Ant Anstead - Cops and Robbers - The Story of the British Police Car

Driving police cars is dangerous and I have had numerous scrapes along the way. I once parked my police car on the A10 to direct the flow of traffic down the very tight Theobalds Lane and to block a crash scene. While waving a lorry on, the back of his rig caught the front bumper of my car, dragging it for about 20 yards while I was frantically waving my arms to get him to stop. Then ‘PING’, he pulled my front bumper clean off. It was a light and funny moment, looking back. However, that same road was also the scene of my first serious POLAC (police accident). I was a passenger in a marked police car with a member of my team driving. We were on ‘blues and twos’, pulling onto the A10 when – BANG – we were smashed into by a silver BMW. We spun off and hit a fence and he went into the oncoming traffic. It was a heavy hit. My partner Sue was stunned. I turned the sirens off and ran to the car that had hit us, trying to get the man out of the car. He wouldn’t leave the vehicle, even as I was pulling at him harder and harder to get him out. It was only when a member of the public came over and said ‘he has his seatbelt on’ that I realised what an idiot I was. Whoops. The next moment I was in an ambulance on the way to hospital. Shock is a weird thing.

K Division was crazy, a busy place to police, with varying crime and a melting pot of cultures. It was on the fringes of north London, making it a Metropolitan police area until Herts took over the patch. I was on the transition team for that takeover, sharing the patrols with the Met until they slowly thinned out to being all Herts officers. A memorable period for policing at this time was that of the petrol strikes, which crippled the nation. It was chaos! Only priority motorists were allowed access to fuel (which meant that, as a member of the emergency services, I was okay). Seeing the public descend into chaos and the queues and distress at the pumps made it clear how important the motor car is to the daily lives of so many people.

My time in K Division was great; I saw and did some crazy things in that period; there was a lot of crime and violence, but I knew that I wanted to lean towards more action, so I applied for probably the most specialist role in the police: the TFU, the Tactical Firearms Unit. That decision changed my life forever.

It’s important to remain focused on the fact that this is a book about police cars, and although I have numerous stories from my time in the police, as I’ve already said, many are not fit for this publication. There was, however, for me, a changing relationship with the police car at the moment when I was handed a gun. I learned very quickly that the police car was now both an effective weapon and a place of safety. Before being armed, I had never really considered the ballistic properties of a car, such as, when the shots start coming which areas are effectively bulletproof? It’s not like the movies; the door of a Volvo T5 won’t stop a bullet! The engine bay, however, would, and that Volvo bonnet became a regular vantage point to lean over while armed with either an MP5 or a G36 weapon. It was the Volvo that became my favourite police car. It was amazing! We used Volvos and Mercedes as ARV (Armed Response Vehicles); both were estate versions, providing more space to carry the extra equipment. The only real performance upgrades were ceramic brake discs and fancy callipers, otherwise it was pretty much a standard car. Between the front seats there was a gun safe that carried larger weapons. First the MP5, a small, compact assault weapon that was really accurate, then some months later we changed to a G36, which was more of a rifle. The safe was locked and the weapons unloaded. We would have to ‘self-arm’ when en route to incidents, and of course for immediate issues we would use our side arm (in my case a Sig Sauer 9mm self-loading pistol) that we carried each day in a holster. Open the boot of the car and there was a huge locked pull-out tray that contained loads more goodies: baton guns, flash bangs (Stun grenades), shotguns with varying types of cartridges, CS rounds and a bunch of other cool non-firearm stuff. Under this tray we carried additional equipment like first-aid kits, a defibrillator, a stinger (a bed of nails for puncturing car tyres) and so on. This ARV was basically a mobile armoury, and therefore it was heavy! The Volvo seemed the perfect choice, and I could not believe that car’s performance ability; it was rapid, but ever so reliable. I can’t remember a single moment when that car let us down – and we put her through her paces, we did not hold back! As we patrolled with two ARVs at a time there was always a race to grab the Volvo ahead of the Mercedes, as all the TFU team knew the Volvo had the edge. Strangely, of the standard road-going cars the Mercedes would be superior, but I guess the Volvo just carried the extra weight better. It was a reliable Swede. The TFU had a host of other unmarked cars, and I spent many hours concealed in the back of a green unmarked Mercedes Sprinter van, in particular. It’s amazing how dark the humour is when there are half a dozen armed coppers trapped in the back of a van. Now if that van could talk …!

The TFU also had an armoured Land Rover 90. I was told it was an ex RUC (Royal Ulster Constabulary) vehicle from Northern Ireland, and it certainly looked the part. Constructed with fully riveted flat steel panels and thick bulletproof glass, it weighed tons. It was also the slowest car I think I have ever driven, taking minutes to get up to 40mph, and it barely went round a corner. I drove it several times but only ever used it operationally once. It was in December one year when we received a report of a man at the Christmas-tree-sales place brandishing a gun. We entered the farm in the Land Rover using the loud-hailer to give the chap instructions. Turned out the gun was a toy.

In 2005 I left the police to follow my true passion of building and restoring cars. My television career kicked off with the Channel 4 car show For the Love of Cars , which ironically was hosted by a TV police legend Philip Glenister, who is well known for playing Detective Inspector Gene Hunt in Ashes to Ashes and Life on Mars . In For the Love of Cars I restored an ex-Scottish Police Rover SD1 known as ‘The Beast’, which went on to sell at auction for a new auction world record for a SD1. Working on that car brought back many police memories, and in the show we retraced the infamous ‘Liver Run’ in the car as a tribute to the original SD1’s dash through London with an organ that was urgently required for a patient mid-surgery.

This book was written in order to share not only my passion for the Great British police car but as a nod back to those proud and amazing years I spent serving the British public.

This is a Hertfordshire Vauxhall Astra Mk3 just like the one I started my policing career driving, only mine didn’t have a bonnet box. It wasn’t fast, but it was a faithful servant and I loved it at the time.