Relevant article - http://www.msnbc.com/local/PISEA/M72580.asp
If you happen to make a trip to Hawaii, take notice of how few marked police cars you will see. AFAIK, patrol officers are given a monthly stipend and are encouraged to use their own car equipped with an external removable light and siren. You will see police officers driving all sorts of cars from Corvettes to Porsches.
Exactly. Turn on your four-way flashers, blink your lights to acknowledge you see the office and are obeying his command to stop and drive slowly to a well-lit place with people around. No legitimate cop will give you a hard time over that.
As for unmarked police cars, they’re used all the time in Pennsylvania for traffic enforcement. Marked cars are sprinkled on the major highways to slow people down, but a lot of the traffic stops come from unmarked units.
BTW: I don’t know about other states, but in Pennsylvania you can request that the officer radio for a marked unit to meet you if you are pulled over by an unmarked car and feel uncomfortable about the situation.
Zappo
I don’t know if it was because of a situation like Wolfman described, but back in the early 70’s, the Georgia Assembly (legilature) passed a law saying ALL gov’t-owned vehicles had to have an emblem of their agency on both sides, and it had to be at least a foot across (don’t remember exact dimension, but it had to be big enough to see).
Ooops, they forgot to exempt undercover cops. So for a year, until the next session, you’d see otherwise ‘unmarked’ brown cars with a brown GBI (Ga. Bureau of Investigation) or blue cars with a blue Atlanta PD shield. To ‘counter-culture’ college studes, it was kinda funny, the Man getting tripped up in his own laws. (Of course, in those days, most anything could set off a case of the giggles.)
I know more than a bit about this. I am required to carry a valid Green Light Card at all times. It permits me to use a Green Courtesy Light, used in NY State for EMS volunteers. ( And as I learned to my chagrin a few years ago, in Massachusettes, by the Incident Commander at a scene… :rolleyes: ).
For a few hundred dollars, I could go shopping in a catalogue I have and outfit a car to be identical in every way to a police car. Lights, etc. Hidden in the grille, whatever.
The point here is that it’s a felony in every municipality in America to impersonate a Police Officer, or any law enforcement officer. Driving around looking like a cop doesn’t mean you have to pull over. Find a well-lit area, ask politely for proper I.D. Look the person over carefully. Make note of badge # and Name Tag. ( Many wear a tag with first initial and last name ).
Saying don’t stop until he shows you his lights is more or less a good idea. However, lights alone don’t cut it. They can be purchased very easily. The authority behind those lights and other accoutrement cannot. True authority needs to be proven, at least to me.
Cartooniverse
While drooling over web sites of the Subaru WRX, I found out that at least one police force in Australia uses those…
I would sign up to be a cop just to be able to drive one of those everyday!
Here in Toronto, I’ve seen a VW Bug police car… and they use some sports cars of some kind on one of the highways… I forget what though…
That’s true. As those who follow the car industry probably know, the WRX has only just been released in the US but has actually been around for quite a few years.
I’m from Sydney, and a few years ago the cops there bought themselves a few WRXs, which were to be used mainly for rapid response to smash-and-grab robberies. A few gangs of thieves in Sydney had taken to stealing WRXs, driving them through the front windows of jewellery or high-fashion clothing stores, filling up the car with loot, and speeding off. The WRX is the ideal car for city chases, because although its top speed is not as high as the normal police cars used in Australia, it has a combination of 4WD handling and fantastic acceleration. The police were constantly losing the thieves until they got WRXs of their own.
I may be wrong, but i believe that they were all marked cars.
It’s gotten to where, here in Houston, if I detect a Camaro in my vicinity I tend to assume it’s a cop even if it’s not carrying a light bar.
One last thing on the Chevy cop cars:
In the late 1980s/early 1990s, Ford got caught in a gap in models as they redesigned the then-police-standard Crown Victoria. Chevy rather hastily put together a police-spec model of the “Moby Dick” Caprice to take advantage of the temporary opening in that market. Furthermore, Chevy apparently signed long-term contracts with a lot of departments, but I heard that from word of mouth and not from the car literature I was keeping up with at the time.
The first Caprices were a travesty, not capable of above about 108 mph and sometimes not even that, and it quickly became known that they could be outrun–by a Jeep Cherokee, in one locally famous case in Northern Virginia.
Chevy quickly fixed this, though, and many police departments eventually came to appreciate the larger interior and nicer ride of the Caprice over the old-model Crown Vic. Chevy may have even won some permanent converts, though I see a lot more Crown Vics out there today than I do the Mobies.
Some states have laws that require vehicles engaged in traffic enforcement to be marked certain colors, such as black and white. In California this is specified in Vehicle Code section 40800. Sorry for including a definitive answer, thus ending this thread.
§ 40800. Vehicle and uniform used by officers
Every traffic officer on duty for the exclusive or main purpose of enforcing the provisions of Division 10 or 11 of this code shall wear a full distinctive uniform, and if the officer while so on duty uses a motor vehicle, it must be painted a distinctive color specified by the commissioner.
This section does not apply to an officer assigned exclusively to the duty of investigating and securing evidence in reference to any theft of a vehicle or failure of a person to stop in the event of an accident or violation of Section 23109 or in reference to any felony charge, or to any officer engaged in serving any warrant when the officer is not engaged in patrolling the highways for the purpose of enforcing the traffic laws.
And if I ruminate on the subject for a bit it seems that, while Fords seemed to dominate the police market in the '60s, through most of the '70s you rarely saw a Chrysler (Plymouth/Dodge) full size 4-dr. sedan that wasn’t working for The Man. Alternative interpretations of the unmistakable Gran Fury headlight/parking light configuration pretty much ran to, “Maybe it’s only a taxicab!”
Yeah, you wished. Even if it was, at 3:00 AM, all you could tell was that it still had something on its roof.
A lot of what influences what becomes the cop car of choice is the mix of the police desire to have a car of ample capability to meet their needs as well as the manufacturers’ ability to perceive that one of their four-door sedan models merits production of a Police Interceptor (Chrysler lingo) package.
I owned a '75 Plymouth Gran Fury Police Interceptor (bought at auction for $800 one year old in 1976 - San Antonio PD vet) that I gradually came to realize was about as close to a NASCAR option as you could get. Toughest rod I ever drove. Without digressing into its peculiarities, let me just say that the car was tailored for the job (and worked great as a taxicab as well).
So they (now defunct Plymouth Division of Daimler-Chrysler) bagged their place in that market by having a Police Interceptor model available.
Ford enjoyed some popularity when it realized the 5.0 Mustang was a marketpiece for the cops, and of late the Camaros have moved into that market segment. Neither model would have prospered in that market segment if the manufacturer had not developed some Police package for those cars.
Born and raised in California, I have NEVER seen an UNmarked police vehicle chasing & stopping moving traffic violators. Fellow Californians, have any of you seen or been ticketed by a car without the words Police or Sheriff emblazoned on the sides?? This, of course, includes motorcycles. Even the cops riding bicycles or horses have very obvious POLICE on their helmuts or shirts or jackets.
Here in BC the cops have all sorts of unmarked cars. Vans, beat-up pickup trucks, sedans, PT Cruisers, so on and so forth. They even have a few tricked up to look like ‘ricer’ specials.
They come in lots of colours, too, so you can’t just say “ooh, white Caprice, odds are it’s a cop!”
The main reason for all these unmarked cars is to nab folks doing stuff they shouldn’t on highways, or the folks who like to race on the streets in heavy traffic.
Actually, they just reinstated the unmarked cars in Suffolk County recently. Those big electronic signs on the L.I.E. all say “SCPD Uses Unmarked Police Cars For Enforcement”. I know in the past this wasn’t the case, thus the reason for the signs so that everyone is aware now.
You’re probably thinking of the real police officers in marked police cars that pulled women over. One guy had forced women to perform sexual activites, and another made several women walk home naked or in their panties. I believe both were fired, and their trials are still ongoing.
As a general rule, I think putting on your hazard lights signifies to the officer that you realize he’s pulling you over, but you’re not comfortable stopping yet and will pull over when you get to a safe area.
I don’t know about the legality of unmarked police cars in Delware, but they have been using a kind of half way solution. A couple of years ago, the highway patrol got a few cars that are marked on the sides and rear, but otherwise do not look like a police car. They are not the typical Crown Vic and they have no lights on the roof. The lights are on the ceiling of the cabin. So in the your rearview mirror, they don’t look like cops, until they light up and pull you over (not that I have any personal experience with this.) But they still are marked, and have that visible police presence once they are beside or in front of you.
-G
Make that Delaware. It’s not like I’ve been spelling it my entire life:)
-G
IIRC, South Carolina has some 5-series BMW police cars, donated by BMW when they opened the manufacturing plant there. But that doesn’t alter your point; BMW’s are usually too expensive in North America to use as police cars.
A few months ago, while I was on my way home from work near Seattle, I saw two cars pulled over on the shoulder of I-5 by Boeing field. The front car was getting a ticket from a fully uniformed WSP trooper, who had just stepped out from a white…
Volvo. I was pretty impressed. It had the strobes in the taillights and headlights. I figure it was a drug seizure or something.
Back in Maryland, the Staties put their trunks open, and they are high enough when open that you can’t see the light bar when you’re coming up behind them. It’s pretty effective on a flat road like 301.
-pk
Still waiting to hear from Californians on this topic. Does CAL have laws against UNmarked police cars? Certainly an imposter would be one concern why all police vehicles are marked BUT I am convinced that we would all be more careful knowing that any vehicle we see could be an unmarked police car. The benefit would far exceed the negative.
This sounds like a great way to get out of a ticket 
.
You: “Officer, I’d like you to radio for an unmarked car.”
Officer: “Ahh, the hell with it, consider this a verbal warning.”