Identify, Define, and Describe the Problem:
The analysis begins with a brief history that recounts when the problem was recognized and the way in which the victims’ plight was originally portrayed.
For decades, concern about the risks surrounding auto- mobile travel centered on accidents caused by hazardous road conditions, speeding, and drunk driving. Although flare-ups between motorists with short fuses must have been taking place since the onset of the automobile age well over 100 years ago, they remained under the radar until the news media began to report on a spate of “freeway shootings” (in California in 1977, in Houston in 1982, in Los Angeles in 1987, and in Detroit in 1989). Newspaper headlines originally dubbed the frightening situations as “road assaults,” “free- way free-for-alls,” “highway violence,” “highway hostility,” “motorist mayhem,” and even merely “unfriendly driving.” Yet concerns about becoming a casualty of one of these confrontations on wheels did not mount until a media account coined the phrase “road rage” in 1988; the catchy alliteration was meant to capture the essence of an armed attack in which a Florida driver shot a passenger in a car that had cut him off (see Best, 1991; and Roberts and Indermaur, 2005). During the 1990s, the sudden emergence and rapid diffusion (across the country and around the globe) of sub- stantial media attention to this “new crime” demonstrated how large audiences of frazzled commuters and anxious tra- velers considered this amorphous yet omnipresent threat to be of great relevance. Colorful accounts—about 10,000 stor- ies between 1990 and 1996, and nearly 4,000 in 1997 alone— described a “spreading epidemic” of “ugly acts of freeway fury” in which cursing, seething, and stressed-out motorists were “driven to destruction,” because it was “high noon on the country’s streets and highways.” Roads were pictured as “resembling something out of the Wild West,” “highways to homicide,” “shooting galleries,” “war zones,” and even “ter- ror zones.” Journalists, reflecting the popular movies of their day, originally branded offenders as “road warriors” and “Rambos,” who rejected the prevailing outlook of “have a nice day” in favor of a “make my day” chip-on-the-shoulder approach to dealing with strangers. Drivers lost their tempers and took their frustrations out on each other in numerous ways, ranging from fistfights to intentional collisions to gunfire (see Best, 1991; Mizell, 1997; Fumento, 1998; and Roberts and Indermaur, 2005).
Today, cases like this one are widely recognized to be examples of “road rage:”
A man in a SUV with his wife and two-year-old daughter is driving down a big city highway known for its traffic jams when he suddenly finds himself surrounded by a swarm of men on motorcycles. He panics and bumps one of the motorcyclists; another dismounts and he accidently runs over him. Fearing for his safety and the well-being of his family, he races down an exit ramp with the motor- cycle riders in hot pursuit. They catch up with him on a busy street, smash his vehicle’s windows, and drag him from his SUV. A video of the beatdown goes viral, drawing a great deal of international attention, as viewers ask, “Where were the police—what took them so long to break up this attack on this besieged motorist?” (It turns out that one of the “bikers” actually was an undercover officer infiltrating the gang, but he is indicted for assault, along with 10 others.) (Long and Peltz, 2013)