Honolulu Police Vehicles (More pictures)
- Thread starter fedsig7
- Start date
Does the Honolulu PD still rely primarily on officer-owned vehicles that get subsidized by the city? I've always though that was a pretty creative program. Sure simplifies things for the department.
Yep! HPD still has the subsidized program. Once officers spend about 5 to 7 years in a white (patrol) car, they can get promoted to "Motorman" and given a monthly "Motor Check" to help pay for their own car. HPD has a fleet of about 200 white cars.
Back in the 70's you'd see these running around the street!
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Nice old rig. What did HPD use for sirens on the officer-owned cars? Anything specific, or were the officers allowed to do what they wanted like Texas DPS did for many years.Yep! HPD still has the subsidized program. Once officers spend about 5 to 7 years in a white (patrol) car, they can get promoted to "Motorman" and given a monthly "Motor Check" to help pay for their own car. HPD has a fleet of about 200 white cars.
Back in the 70's you'd see these running around the street!
I can barely remember, but if I recall it was similar to the Whelen Alpha siren with two tones (Wail/Yelp). Whelen has since created a siren box specifically for HPD with its own part number. Officers were provided both roof light and siren. Wig-wags were allowed and so were grille lights (Until there was a murder of a woman, in which the suspect had blue grille lights). After that, they took that out of the vehicle policy.
Texas DPS in the early days furnished their cars with a single red spotlight and a small EG or Sireno M1 siren underhood. Anything else that the trooper wanted to do, they could but at their own expense. For most of the 50s and 60s when I was growing up, all you saw was the basic pkg. But in the late 60s and on you began to see other variations. A friend of my dad's was the chief accident investigator for this DPS region. Since he ran "hot" more than the average trooper, he fixed his car up with twin EG sirens, grille lights and big 6" red deck lights. Around 1963 a few troopers added red Federal 17 beacons, but kept the little sirens. And by the late 60s into the early 70s troopers started putting VisiBars on their cars. Some had Federal WG sirens in the center but a few started putting CP25 speakers and various electronic sirens. When DPS started using the downsized Mustangs, they came with North American electronic sirens and N.A. red/blue sealed-beam grille lights.
