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warhorse10_9 wrote:

jdhz28 wrote:I am all for catching more DWI offenders, but for speeding....I don't think I should get a ticket by a department that gets paid from my tax dollars, for driving a truck I paid for on a highway my tax dollars go to maintain. I have a heavy foot, it's a medical condition. I'm just saying.... I wonder if they would mind if I painted half of my truck like a police car so slow people would get out of my way????

But yes, I think they would mind.

Many years ago my late wife, at the time just my new girlfriend, had received a car from a state auction. A prior boyfriend of hers was a dealer and only dealers could bid at those auctions, and he got it for her cheap, really cheap, like $600.00 for a retired NY State Police cruiser, which had been a commander's vehicle and had low milage. He expected to be paid in more than dollars and she broke up with him over it.

All NYSP decommissioned police vehicles had the lights and other hardware removed, and the white portions painted over with black paint, rendering an all black car which you would never know had been a police car, right?

The only problem was that the dealer that bought the car was responsible for doing a repaint over the primer black that the state garage had sprayed on, and the state garage had used the state of the art, for 1968, spray cans to lay a fog of black over the top, and the lettering on the sides, front, and back.

And they didn't do any prep on the car before spraying it, so ones that had been waxed, like commander's vehicles, kind of shed the single layer of generic black primer. which had been applied in less than optimum weather conditions.

We got stopped several times while we were dating for having the letters "STATE POLICE" clearly visible on the hood and trunk. I got smart and sanded down the letters in front, and the big logos on the side, and applied liberal amounts of primer and overcoat, and that cut down on the stops.

The letters on the back were reflective and resisted painting, and I didn't want to peel them off because they had been painted around and would be tough to level out (I eventually did anyway) so we made a big hit right after we got married and moved to our new home, and all the kids around saw that we had a "State Police undercover car" in our driveway.

In the late 60s the city of Albany, NY experimented with a "neighborhood unit" concept for the police department. Great idea but some of the implementation left a lot to be desired. Working out of rented storefronts, usually out of business otherrwise and sometimes in pretty bad shape, the LEOs were supposed to estabish good relations with their neighbors and blend in.

No more blue uniforms, neat slacks, shirts and ties, with loafers and blazers to complete the ensemble, and the blazers were not tailored to fit over duty belts, which were still worn, along with the same old eight corner hats.

No matter that the people they were "connecting" with never wore stuff that looked even vaguely like the golf pros that our cops now resembled, the city charged ahead with the program undaunted by criticism leveled at the "uniforms" and new patrol cars.

And the patrol cars, with no big light racks on top, only "Kojak" lights on the dash or tossed on the roof, were painted a bilious yellow, which just happened to be the exact same shade as the Yellow Cab Company's fleet. There was some suspicion, confirmed decades later, that a little corruption had wended its way into the Corning administration ("Say it ain't so, Joe.") and the contract to paint the vehicles was let to the same company that painted the cabs, for about twice the price that it cost to do a cab, which they justified because there was extra care taken on the patrol cars, masking, etc.

Having been away on a long cruise in the Navy while all of this was implemented, I was blissfully unaware of this new development when I arrived at the Trailways terminal in Albany, in a big rush to go see my girlfriend, later to be my wife for 23 years, and scurried out to the taxi stand on Broadway.

As luck would have it, there was a cab sitting at the curb right out front, and I was alone in approaching and hopping in. I named my destination and told the driver that there was a good tip in it for him to hurry it up a little.

The cops in the front seat just turned and stared at me, seabag and all, trying to fathom out what was going on.