carpediemracing 

It's not just gas costs. It's also the initial and maintenance cost of a patrol vehicle. Around here a lot of police use SUVs - so you're looking at $30-40k per car/SUV, maybe, what, like a tank a day? I dunno. $60-80-100? I don't own an SUV but the van I use for Bethel takes 40 gallons of gas - so $150-160 per tank at the current rate. It gets 8-12 mpg so I can drive it about 350-400 miles per tank, maybe a day of driving around all day.

On a side note - To think that in my old job I helped the futures guys do this to the oil prices. Really sucks.

Bike is, at a top end, maybe $2-3k, virtually no maintenance (tires, tubes, chain, cassette - do everything for the cost of a "tune-up" for a car/SUV), and doesn't require registration, insurance, etc (do towns pay for that too? They must.)

Of course, around here, if you try and patrol the 2-3 acre zoned areas, it'll take a while to ride around the hilly roads. My town has a bike patrol but there's virtually no good place for them to patrol on a bike. Nearby towns ditto.

In Norwalk CT the bike patrol used to be pretty intense. Our shop did the Norwalk bikes for a while (they used top end Cannondale full suspension mtbs for a while) and the owner did a "ride along" in South Norwalk on some late night patrol. Bottles tossed at him, swearing, tons of kids running around at 1 AM, crowds of people on street corners, people yelling that "hey that's the cop that ***** me", spit, garbage, the whole shebang. The cop just ignored it all, told the owner "okay, that guy there owns that corner, he's part of this gang, he sells such and such. That guy over there owns that corner"... etc etc etc. Now I think it's less so, but there are still shootings and such in the bad parts of town.

cdr

hyunelan2

I'll see if I can sneak over to the garage and take a few pics of our police bikes. We have a few Treks, and some Specialized Electric thing that was donated. I've never seen that used though, just the police-spec Trek bikes.

They use them for stuff like festivals, park patrols, community relations. Last year due to staff shortages, the bikes didn't move much, but they are trying to get back into it pretty-hard this year. It's one of the new chief's priorities.

Tulex

First, I'm ticked that I don't have cable, so I won't be watching the high speed chases. I bet they call them off a lot quicker on bikes.
Second, now lets see what the cops think of bike theft......

jwhit75

my police force here have had the bikes for a while, as a matter a fact, a few years back i seen one get flatted passing thru a cross walk by an 90 year old lady in a huge cadillac. it was very amussing. He bounced right back up no worse for wear, but it was very funny.

TRUMPHENT

Memorial Day, I followed a Metro-Dade officer on his bike going south on Old Cutler Road. He was moving right along, too. That route has a lot egress to Biscayne Bay for recreation.

waterrockets 

I was cheering a family member at the CapTex tri this weekend, and spent some time talking to a pair of bike cops. Their bikes were pretty straightforward hard-tail MTBs. They were the Trek Police model, probably 5 years old. They had road/hybrid tires (low tread in the middle), and cantilever brakes. They also have a seatpost-clamp rear rack, and a bag on top of that. I'm not sure what's in the bag, but those bikes are probably not much south of 30 lbs.

They said that they got some budget for the program this year, and were going to get a couple new bikes, but they decided to upgrade the current bikes instead. They're going to shed all the suspension forks for rigid, among other minor changes (very good idea, in my opinion).

They sometimes have to take cruisers out for various reasons, and they said it feels like being in prison compared to the bike. These guys REALLY liked patrolling on the bike.

They also pull cars over frequently. Obviously not in a chase, but they have no trouble getting people to pull over. They work in an urban environment, so it's easy to catch them at a light or stop sign.

I refrained from telling them the story of my teammate who was going to get pulled over for speeding in a park (on his bike). He looked back, saw the cop was on an MTB, double checked that he wasn't wearing his team kit, and sprinted away, never to be seen again.

Rex G

In the mid-1980's, I and another officer were working a plainclothes assignment on bicycles, trying to catch people breaking into cars near a nightclub. Well, we caught a car burglar right away, after a brief chase, but while we were getting him handcuffed, someone stole the other officer's bike. Nothing special about the bikes; they were unclaimed bikes from the property room, but the one being stolen on the first night meant no more bicycling for burglars; back to cars or on-foot surveillance. At this time, uniformed patrol on bikes was not used by my agency; that started in a big way in the 1990's, then was scaled back as attrition meant we needed the mobility of cars, as I work for a very expansive, sprawling city. Now, bikes are used primarily downtown, in parks, and in green belt areas.

AssosMan

Silent freewheel????!!!! I thought that freewheels were a thing of the past. My $100 Forte Titan Wheelset has a silent freehub. I think its normal until it starts to break in and needs a relube.....

caloso

Silent hubs. I guess we can figure out which side of the Campy-Shimano debate the cops are on.

AEO

my 105 (5600) free hub is very silent. *thunk thunk thunk*
makes my ultegra free hub sound like a freight train. *click click click*

Cdy291

I'd like to piss one of them of some time just to make them chase me, and see how long they could go

jefferee

Just gotta make sure the answer isn't "longer than you"...

maddyfish

We have them here, they patrol on friday/SAt nights to look for drunk kids. Also on Holloween night watching the trick or treaters. Only thing is they ride at night, wrong way, with no lights.

Jasper Storm

I was droped by a Seattle Bike Cop at about mile 145 on the Seattle to Portland a couple years back. He was on his "service bike" and I was on a Rockhopper. He had skinnier tires than my 26x2.1's, but he was packing a P226 or P229, which weighs more than any weight savings from carbonizing your forks, seatpost, and handlebars. Not to mention that having that extra weight on one side can mess your posture up, and should be offset with some weight on the other side (radio, extra magazine, etc.).
They truly earn all the donuts they can eat.

sfrider 

The SFPD uses bikes a lot; makes a good deterrent. Much easier to spot something going on from a bike at 10-15mph than from a cruiser at 35. Like burglaries, car boosts, vandalism/tagging, gang and drug activity, etc. An officer on a bike is MUCH more visible than a patrol car - when the patrol zips by the perps simply duck out of view for a couple of seconds. Not as easy to escape notice when the officer is on a bicycle. But I do think walking is too slow and doesn't cover enough area, so cycling makes for a perfect compromise.

As for car thieves, I don't think they can afford gas anymore... And a lot of people would love to have their unsellable SUVs and trucks stolen so they can collect insurance.

sfrider 

You can outrun a cop but you can't outrun their Motorola...

slvoid

I'm surprised they don't just have the officers patroling in 50mpg hybrids or 40-50mpg sportbikes.

A dirtbike would be no prob, reach decent speeds, good acceleration, goes up and down stairs.

sfrider 

They do here, but mainly for crowd control. KLR650s.

uclamutt

I worked as an EMT at UCLA's Police Department during college.

They had regular bike patrols (especially during large events) and were quite effective. The bike patrols were especially useful when patrolling the dark apartment area. They caught a good number of burglars, car thieves, muggers in the act because their bikes were quiet and they were much more inconspicuous than a crown vic.

Most of them were hard-core cyclists so they could keep up with the best of them and pulled over a lot of cars (the numerous red lights certainly helped). The EMT's used the same bikes (Trek Police model). It's a heavy bike, but it could take a beating....