| By :
Paul Wise
Emergency lightbars were the biggest innovation to be implemented on police cars since they were outfitted with radios back in the 1920s by Motorola. Originally, they were just simple metal bars mounted on the roof of a vehicle that provided a sturdy foundation for rotating beacons, sirens, and other audio-visual communications systems, but the term now refers to a single physically contiguous unit, often with elongated domes on either side for enclosing sirens. Today's emergency lightbars are complete off-the-shelf systems that can contain any number of light and siren configurations, including whole public address systems. Many modern models even offer programmable flash patterns or whole message boards reminiscent of scrolling marquees. There are even those which are customized to meet the unique requirements of certain clients, with designs that hug the roof with a low aerodynamic profile for stealth or use a v-shaped layout to help with lateral vehicular illumination. Aside from being the second biggest innovation to hit police cars since they were first introduced, emergency lightbars are probably the one characteristic most associated with a patrol car, such that a common quip in many inner-city neighborhoods is a sound mimicking the boowoop-boowoop of the siren! It's become a kind of urban shorthand for "police," a kind of fake birdcall used by some residents to surreptitiously announce the presence of police or jokingly refer to them. But such practices may become outdated if the advocates of so-called community policing have their way. Proponents of this growing trend argue that police officers have retreated inside their squad cars and need to do good old-fashioned walking patrols in order to form personal bonds of understanding and respect with members of the community. If adopted wholesale, as would seem to be the case (put for the economic malaise of late; more on this in a moment), the boowoop-boowoop birdcall may well be a thing of the past as new generations grow up seeing only or even just mainly foot patrolmen and women instead of patrol cars. Yet community policing is expensive, not to mention leaving officers feeling more exposed. There is a certain psychological comfort in that metal cocoon which is important to an officer performing at his or her peak, but what may finally doom community policing is the very reason why it had been increasingly abandoned in the first place: efficiency. It is simply more cost-efficient to have officers be able to cover a wide area. Vehicles also allow them to carry specialized equipment such as heart defibrillators. And in these economically challenging times when even previously sacrosanct police department budgets are subject to cutbacks, every dollar counts - and community policing is just much too expensive, not to mention substantially more dangerous.
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