Copyright © Another Constable – View this article and others HERE
First published Sunday 28th January 2007:
Chasing Cars
Not for the first time, one of our unmarked cars has been chased (albeit briefly) by one of our marked cars. Of course, when this happens, we all immediately wet ourselves laughing at the expense of the foolish driver that initiated a pursuit, for it to end 10 seconds later when the unmarked car realises it’s being chased and calls it off. Usually said pursuing driver is not a bit amused, and not only embarrassed for the moment, but unlikely to live it down any time soon.
These “pursuits” always start on nights, when we have plain clothes officers out on pro-active duties in unmarked vehicles. The plain clothes officers may see something down a side street (bloke lurking by car doors in dark clothing with hood up for example) and rapidly dart into the street to investigate. A common tactic to get closer to these people without announcing yourself might be to turn off the vehicle’s headlights (sidelights don’t give the game away nearly as much). Of course, to a nearby marked police car, it appears as though a bandit vehicle has suddenly gone “lights out” and shot off from the main road. Pursuit initiated!
Another snag is that the plain clothes officers will then generally be focussed on the person that has caught their eye and tend not to listen so keenly to their radios – and so are unlikely to hear the words “Scramble. Dark vehicle, lights out, towards Random Lane”. The giveaway usually comes 10 seconds later when blue stobes start lighting the world up behind them, and then they listen to the radio to find out what the blue lights are all about and hear that there is a chase on. They may even get all excited and drive quickly off in the direction that the pursuit sounds as though it is heading in the hope of tagging on the back. It’s usually then that they become acutely aware that it is indeed them that are being chased, put their own (discreet) blue lights and rear reds on and call a halt to the proceedings.
At that point, the pursuer has to cancel the pursuit over the air, and explain that they have in fact just started to chase plain clothes colleagues. It is then that the rest of the section fall about laughing.
More embarrassingly, our plain cars are no secret “sneaky beaky” vehicles. All the local nominals know our vehicles, and usually refer to them by “name” (our vehicles are usually named by the last 3 characters of the registration – Joe Bloggs might see you in uniform one day and say “I saw you in that snide JKZ last night). So, if all the local crooks know the vehicles, which are indeed used pretty much all day every day by one department or another, then it adds to the embarrassment of the pursuer that he didn’t recognise that the car was one of ours. Especially when he was probably driving it himself a couple of nights ago. I suppose he could argue that it was dark… and the car was in the distance… and that he only caught a glimpse of it… etc. The excuses fell on deaf ears, and indeed were drowned out by the continuous laughter of all of his colleagues 
