Highway patrol vehicles certainly when seen by most speeding cars are helpful in getting them to slow down. But when none are in sight, most of us have seen cars zooming down the freeways at tremendous speeds, zig-zaging in and out of lanes. And how many times have we said:" Whenever you see a bast–d like him/her endangering people’s lives, there, of course, arn’t any cops around?
To those of you in police work or knowledgeable of the laws, why can’t there be unmarked cars ALSO patrolling the highways…not to nail those of us who go 75 miles in a 65 mile/hr zone but the reckless drivers = 80-100 miles/hrs weaving in and out of traffic?
I’m aware of undercover police vehicles on special assignments.
Um, I have no idea where you’re from but here in Illinois (and every state I’ve driven through) I see a plethora of unmarked Highway Partol cars on the interstates. Usually a Camaro, Mustang, or SUV although there are a few unmarked Caprices’s too.
Gotta guess the OP is fundamentally incorrect on this one, unless there happens to be a state which I am not aware of that has a policy that states “Police cars must be marked as such”.
Why do law enforcement agencies use Chevy Caprices as their chief patrol vehicle, the only car whose headlights and taillights I can recognize on a dark night from over a quarter mile away? Seriously, what other makes/models can you identify just by their headlights and taillights?
Dodge Intrepid.
But I think many police departments have moved away from the Caprice-actually, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Caprice as a cop car. I can’t think of what type of car they use in Atlanta, though I know Griffin, Georgia has one Corvette that is marked, and there are areas in Mississippi that began using SUVs of some sort a couple of years ago.
Here in Missouri I’ve also seen unmarked cars patrolling the highways. I’ve seen Mustangs, Camaros, Crown Victorias and once, a Monte Carlo.
BTW, you can also easily recognize Dodge Neons and Ford Focuses (Foci?) by the headlights and taillights, but I doubt they’d be very useful as a cop car.
I would assume that police departments buy a lot of Caprices because Chevy makes them available to police departments at a good price and no one else has stepped up to match them.
I seem to recall that in one of the NY suburbs about a decade ago one of the local constabularies stopped using unmarked vehicles for routine traffic stops because they had some guy who was impersonating a police officer to try to harrass/pick up women.
Is that one of those false memories, or did it happen?
Here in Connecticut, most every State Police vehicle I see is effectively “unmarked”. They use solid-color Crown Vics, typically a blue-grey color, and sometimes brown. They have a “badge” (a circular label proclaiming “State Police”) affixed to the bumper, but that’s it. In fact, most speed-enforcement vehicles I see are unmarked, unless its in-town police.
Regarding the Caprice: it’s odd that you mention them, since they aren’t nearly as popular as they were 5+ years ago. Chevy no longer makes the Caprice (unless they make a special police-only version). Most all police cruisers are now Ford Crown Victorias, which was Ford’s equivilent. I’ve seen Chevy (new) Impalas with police packages, but these strike me as smaller cars than police typically use. It seems like they’re more used for campus police and such where you’d (presumably) be up against lower firepower, as it were.
I still see older Chevy Caprices, but most towns with larger police departments no longer use them due to their age.
I’m really sorry to have soiled you all with that.
Second:
Just one man’s opinion here, but I’d wager that no matter what make of vehicle cops drove the majority of aware drivers could peg one at a thousand paces. Its not that Caprices are especially easy to recognize (really, they are rectangles like a million other cars) its just that we’re all so used to being alert for them we can notice the small subtleties of them to avoid trouble. If it were a Taurus, Intrepid, Blazer, or Mustang we’d probably learn to notice them in a matter of months too. The real aid is that Caprices and Crown Vic’s are so poorly favored by the rest of the public that they tend to stand out.
As Crunchy mentioned, here in the St. Louis area, there are a very wide range of vehicles used, and most times I see someone pulled over, it’s by an unmarked car of varying make, and varying color. They are a bit sneaky around here. And in my area of town, there are more Impalas showing up each month. Just a guess, but I would assume that a lot of departments got just one or two Impalas for sort of a field test to see what the officers thought in comparison to the Crown Vics and Caprices, because it’s a smaller vehicle.
Don’t know about your memory manny but that’s actually happened in East Lansing MI, recently - a guy had a car that was marked in a similar fashion to the ELPD’s car. They recently started changing their markings to prevent issues.
On the OP. One thing, as a female, I’d be a bit concerned about pulling over for an unmarked car in a remote area. Or at least my mommy told me to be.
Any unmarked patrol car that I’ve ever seen stop someone has had red and blue lights - and sometimes white strobes - hidden in the front grille and rear window. They’re tough to see when off and tough to miss when they’re on. Also, when the red and blue lights are on, the headlights often strobe between regular and high beams. I’d say that if an unmarked cop car is pulling you over, he’ll turn on his lights to let you know he means business. Don’t stop until he shows you his lights.
I’ve heard that if a cop wants to stop you on a dark deserted road, there’s nothing wrong with driving until you reach a well-lit or busy area, especially if you’re a woman alone in the vehicle. A legit cop shouldn’t hassle you for that.
Here in Baltimore just this week a couple were put into a car by two guys posing as cops, and driven to a park where they were robbed and stripped, and the woman was sexually assaulted. I’m not sure if they had badges and/or uniforms, but i’ll bet they had a plain car.
Although i realize that there are irresponsible and even criminal cops out there, if i were getting pulled over for speeding, i’d feel a bit better if the car had big “Police” signs and decals all over it.
By the way, after the fake cops left, the couple ran naked to a house and called the real cops. As the cops were interviewing the couple in the park where they had been taken, the fakers drove past the same park, the couple saw them and pointed out the car to the cops, and they were caught. No brain surgeons, those guys.
Police departments are gradually moving away from unmarked patrol cars in many areas because of people impersonating cops and pulling people over and robbing them or worse.
The reason police departments use Caprices (not many of those left) and Crown Vics is that they are (or in the case of the Caprice were) large, rear wheel drive vehicles. Cops carry a lot of gear these days and its a bitch to try and fit it into a small car. Chevy has tried to sell police departments on the new “Impala,” but not too many are biting. The cars are cramped, slower than a Crown Vic, and by being front wheel drive, more susceptable to crippling damage in a front end collision. A rear wheel drive car can take a front end collision better because the engine sits slightly farther back in the car and the transmission isn’t quite as vulnerable to damage.
As to the question of unmarked’s being used for traffic control…
I remember reading (I think it was in Parade) about how the Maryland State Patrol (or whatever they are called there) had taken to using cars that had been impounded as radar cars. So you’d see a young lady in an MG, or perhaps a semi or a pickup filled with hay at the side of the road, and suddenly, out would come the arm with the radar and ZAP they had you. Half a mile up would be the cruiser, waiting to pull you over. Pretty sneaky.
I believe that in Wyoming Unmarked police cars were illegal. Some state legistator got pulled over by one, and brought it up in the next session. I believe the reasoning used was that the primary police objective is to “serve and protect” not stop traffic offenders, And that unmarked police cars compromise the main objective in that you can’t ask them for help. It may have been changed since then however. Butother states or areas may not allow unmarked patrol cars.
Colorado used to have unmarked police cars that were a joke. Every single one was the obvious White Caprice with spot lights on the mirrors. They wern’t very unmarked since 95% of the white caprices you saw were a cop. Lately though I have seen a couple Tauruses(Tauri?) in various colors and red cavalier so I guess they figured it out.
Actually it was only in the last year that there was a rash of them in Nassau and Suffolk counties. Some were real cops, others were impersonators. In fact, I think there’s one case that the cop pled guilty that’s still (I think) going on in some way.
Within the last few years Iowa has had a very bad experience with unmarked police cars and people impersonating police officers. A woman driving home in the country and after dark, stopped for an unmarked car with red flashers. It was a pair sociopathic young men who robbed and murdered her. After that the law enforcement people put out the word that you should not stop for and unmarked car in an isolated area. Rather you should signal an acknowledgement of some sort by flashing your lights, drive at a reasonable speed to a place where there are other people and then stop. A few cowboy cops tried to charge people who did this with failure to yield to an emergency vehicle or evading a law enforcement vehicle, but common sense prevailed.
A friend of mine, now a retired State Trooper, says that he hated it when he was assigned to the area’s unmarked car. When he drove a marked car he got to drive around all day, drink coffee, eat doughnuts, visit with other cops, flirt with waitresses and generally have a good time. When he had the unmarked car people were constantly doing unlawful stuff that he could not ignore right in front of him. He had to spend all his time arresting people, writing tickets and filling out reports. He barely had time to pull into a Department of Highways garage and take a nap. The only advantage to the unmarked car, as far as he was concerned, was that he was allowed to take off his campaign hat.
The obvious reason for marked cars is so civilians can find the cops when they need a cop. Try flagging down an unmarked car.
In addition, Ford and Chevy have traditionally marketed specific cars to police departments. They usually had beefed up transmissions and such, with the dashboards and trunks built to be more easily modified for radios and other equipment. Back when Dodge was still in that competition I had a classmate buy a surplus Detroit cruiser. It was a tank. The manufacturers bid gainst each other to get the fleet markets (large cities and states).
I don’t know whether Chevy intends to simply surrender that market or if they are planning to mess around with the Impala to try to recapture some of it.