The police in Stockholm yesterday stopped a strange looking police car. It turned out to be an Estonian police patrol on its way back from Germany.

Ooooohhhh!

An OPEL!!! They used to sell those in the USA.

How come the Estonian police don't drive Russian cars? You'd think they would...considering their past history.

What was that car doing in Germany anyway?

Are the German police cars still green and white?

Estonians and Latvians hate Russians for the Soviet occupation. They would probably turn down a Russian car even if it was free. There are a million or so Russian in the countries and they are treated rather harshly, being denied citizenship and citizen rights and so on.


Confusing the German police.

Seriously, the officers had been to some exhibition there.


[This message has been edited by C-H (edited 09-24-2003).]

Bit of a long way round isn't it? Would it not be quicker to drive through Poland, Lithuania and Latvia?

PS:

C-H I forgot to ask:

Do the Stockholm Polis drive Volvos or Saabs?

Yeah, they are. Haven't changed much, except they got new cars.
Austrian ones are white and used to have a fluorescent orange stripe below the windows. Now they get a red stripe (both about 15 cm wide). VW Golf used to be real common, guys higher up in the police hierarchy now drive Chrysler Voyager. Volkswagen van for larger jobs.
Back in the old days they usually had Volkswagen Beetle and Puch 500 (an Austrian-made version of the Fiat 500 with different engine and transmission), usually in the Version 650TR (looked real harmless, but was absolutely lightweight (around 500kg) and had quite a heavy engine 40 to 50 HP, depending on version), so it could easily catch up with a Mercedes of those days. My Dad always tells the story of how he was used to driving a 500 at truck speed (80 km/h) uphill, and then he once drove a 650TR, going 120 up the mountain. The trucks quickly came closer!).

Enjoy
http://www.anzwers.org/free/policecars/city1.html

Over here in Ireland the Police (Gardai) generally drive either Ford, Opel or Toyota as patrol cars usually nothing smaller than a Mondeo or an Opel Vectra though. You rarely see very small Garda cars.

(And for anyone in the UK, we don't have Vauxhall in the Republic of Ireland for some reason but Right hand drive opels manufactured in Germany.. strange scenario something to do with Vauxhall being associated with rust)

For traffic patrols they've a few unmarked suped up high end opel omegas and volvos mostly along with some pretty powerful 4x4s like jeeps, rangerovers etc.



Images from www.garda.ie

Of course you just KNEW the forum clown was going to come up with this.

This is a NYC Sanitation Department police car. These are the guys that make sure building staff and house owners have bundled up their trash, separated their recyclables, etc. Garbage police, in other words.

Anyway....it seems like the garbage police thought it was time to throw this particular vehicle ... where else?



How did I miss it that morning on my way to work????

==

And you certainly don't want to get into a drag race with the Fukoka, Japan lawmen when you see them driving around in THIS!!



[This message has been edited by SvenNYC (edited 09-24-2003).]

The link to international police cars backs up a theory I've had from the '70s.
Police cars, including undercover 'ghost cars' never have whitewalls.
Anyone know why? I am curious.

Is there a ferry service from Sweden to Latvia/Lithuania?

Some of the British police cars are really overdoing the markings these days. These things are dazzling, although I suppose that if you get stuck in a bad traffic jam you can always play checkers on the side!


It's a far cry from when the cars looked like this:

or even this:


And who in Britain remembers the Morris Minor "Panda" cars with the rather light, almost greenish shade of blue?


Rather hard to picture Inspector Regan riding around in one of these!

More historic police vehicles from the City of Dundee, Scotland .


[This message has been edited by pauluk (edited 09-25-2003).]

Since Austria is not on the list here'S a classic Austrian police car.



The picture is from an elementary school visiting the nearest police department. Newer cars have a red stripe instead.

Hutch and Paul,

there is indeed a ferry line from Stockholm to Tallin, Estonia.

Sven,

The Swedish police drive both Volvos and Saabs, but also some other brands like Volkswagen. (It's a Volvo in the picture.)
They have tried faster cars too, like this one:

Paul:
That checkerboard style is quite, um, conspicuous! I can just imagine them trying to sneak up on a suspect. They'd blind the poor fellow!

Sven:
Sound familiar? (NYPD)

I remember when Philadelphia police cars sounded like this .

Have any countries changed to the "American" sounding sirens, rather than the traditional "hi-lo" of two horns?

Yes, Britain has changed over. I don't know if there are any of the older hi-lo type sirens left in service anywhere in the country, but it must be several years since I last heard one.

The modern emergency sirens are more likely to sound something like this: http://www.met.police.uk/audio/siren2.wav

Up until the 1960s emergency vehicles here commonly used a bell -- You can see one fitted just above the front bumper in one of the pictures above.

The single rotating beacon (which was always blue in the U.K., not red) of the 1960s/1970s has also given way to multiple strobe lights in a long strip. Some of these new strobes are too bright, in my opinion.

I came upon a minor traffic accident on a dark lane one night a few weeks ago, and the patrol car was stopped at the roadside with all the lights flashing. The cop waved me through past the other cars, but by the time I was almost level with the police car I could barely see where I was going for all the strobe lights in my eyes.

Thinkgood:

Ohhh that is a VERY familiar sound here.

Of course, the recording you mention is actually a police car toggling its siren to get through traffic and sneak through red lights (usually when not on call ) or when they signal a driver on a local street to pull over -- they usually sneak up on you and toot the siren a couple of times and flash the lights. That means, "pull over, you've commited some kind of infraction"

Seems like the regular horn and the siren are an all-in one unit in the NYPD cars, so when they need to use the horn, they just toggle the siren on and off. Silly system....

The actual siren blasting at full throttle when a unit is responding to a call is VERY vicious sounding. The car is rolling down the street at 40 miles an hour and blasting this WHEEE _OHHHH WHEEEE OHHHH WHEEEE OOHHH and all lights going.

The NYFD trucks actually use both sirens and air horns (like the ones on trains and trucks) at the same time, you think it's a train barreling through the street. I think even a deaf guy can hear that monster and jump out of the way in time!!

I've actually, from time to time heard some cars with "hi lo" sirens. Don't know if they're ambulances or some type of police cars (with different siren sounds).

P.S.: I prefer when our police cars were all blue with white stripes and a white top. I don't like this white with a few blue stripes. Makes it look cheap. In fact, it probably is cheaper, since it's a stock white color and then they just apply these blue stick-on stripes.

[This message has been edited by SvenNYC (edited 09-25-2003).]

Sven:

I believe NYPD is now using "Federal Signal" brand sirens:
http://www.galls.com/techsupport.html#siren

Here's something similar to the FD sirens (note that the filesize is over 200k).

Waaayy back our fire department trucks used to have mechanical sirens sounding like the NY one, and I think prior to that they had bells. Now they're all electronic hi-lo, though every service has it's own sequence. Police is simple hi-lo, fire department as well, but different intervals. Ambulance is something like hi-lo (long) and then a sequence of very short hi-lo sounds. Gas company, PoCo and municipial transportation have different signals as well.
The large stationary sirens (in case of severe emergency, or in rural areas to notify the volontary fire department) are still wailing mechanical sirens.
Our police cars have a single blue rotating light, only ambulances have the strobe bars. Pretty heavy here as well.

Ambulances here still use the Hi-Lo pattern while police and fire tend to use the same sound as the modern UK one posted there.

The police cars here were originally blue but to be more like the rest of Europe they were changed to white a number of years ago.

Blue strobes are reserved for police/ambulance/fire service only.

Any utilities etc use yellow strobes.

I would agree with Paul, like in the UK Irish police cars are getting WAY too bright. There's a row of flashing blue strobes on top and often extra blue strobes built into the grill on the front of the car and possibily installed behind the rear windshield too.

Some of the cars also flash the headlights (left then right)

[This message has been edited by djk (edited 09-25-2003).]

The strobes are very bright, indeed. I would imagine the fuel consumption is higher from all of that equipment.

The latest here (USA) is the "stealth" police car. No light bar on top at all. The lights are concealed strobes, and once you see the lights, it's too late...

Example: http://www.angelfire.com/dc2/rwcar4c/morristwp.html

(Although, the Lo-Jack array might be a giveaway...)

We have those in England now too, along with the "wig-wag" headlights on some cars. I don't think they've installed any alternating back-up lights yet, as on some U.S. cruisers. I suspect that may be because of the U.K. lighting regulations about not showing a white light to the rear except when reversing.

The same rules also say no red lights visible from the front -- If you look at some of the British cars on ThinkGood's link above, you'll see that where they have added lights besides the blue the extra strobes are red to the rear and white to the front.

It really would be a good idea if they could reduce the number and/or intensity of these lights at night. I wonder how many accidents these things have actually caused due to drivers being momentarily blinded by them.

Yeah they use stelth cars with all the strobes hidden behind the windows or in the grills here too for some traffic patrols where they're trying to catch speeders, dangerous drivers etc.

They've rolled out a TrafficWatch number here where by you can phone a 1-800 number and report traffic violations to a call centre that passes it on to local gardai (police) who investigage. All very strange getting members of the public to inform the police like that.

Of course those "secret police" cars are always a dead giveaway.

Ford Crown-Victorias and before that it used to be the Chevrolet Caprice (before the blockheads at Chevrolet decided to discontinue them). Who else drives those damned beasts?

Now if the undercovers were tooling around in little Zastavas (Yugos) or Chevrolet Altos (two cool little cars you can't get here in USA )....we'd have something going here.

Then again...considering the trends here in the USA, if they want to blend in, they'll have to pull out the big 4x4 trucks!!!

Perhaps a Smart Car as a police car?



[This message has been edited by C-H (edited 09-26-2003).]