I saw my first black-and- white Edmonton Police Services patrol car the other day.
The retro look makes quite an impact.
The cars look somewhat menacing in a serve-and-protect kind of way. They speak of a no-nonsense approach to protecting the public and chasing down bad guys.
When I first came to Edmonton, the police cars were an anemic yellow.
That might have shocked some people, but not me.
I grew up in Toronto, and at the time the police cars were yellow there, too.
As a kid, I found that a little odd.
All the shows I saw from across the border showed police cars as black and white.
No doubt many American tourists found the colour of Toronto’s police cars somewhat confusing as well.
One day I watched as a tourist hopped into the vehicle of one of Toronto’s finest only to be told by a shocked and perturbed constable that it was not a taxi and they should get out forthwith.
For many people, black-and-whites bring to mind Adam 12, Dragnet and, if they’re old enough, Highway Patrol and Dick Tracy. The black-and-white I saw took me back to a different time as well, but my memories actually had little to do with the police.
During the late ’60s, from time to time, my friends and I would drive to Niagara Falls, N.Y., to pick up draft dodgers and ferry them across the border to a new life.
Doing so was our way of showing that we did not support the war in Vietnam and that we believed that it was someone’s right to refuse to be the first kid on the block to come home in a box.
After one such run, I was driving two guys to their safe house in downtown Toronto.
A hubbub broke out in the back seat characterized by a number of expletives that I cannot repeat here.
One of the guys shouted at me that the cops were following us.
His face was white with fear. I looked in the rearview mirror and told him that there were no cops following us. He took another peek and insisted that there were several cop cars on our tail.
When I looked into the mirror again, I realized that what he had mistaken for cop cars were actually black- and-white taxis.
“Welcome to Toronto,” I said.
