My City Had The Coolest Police Car In The UK, Briefly

Throughout the 2000s, standard-issue UK police cars were hard to get too excited about. Many forces would often tool around in Vauxhall Astras, maybe Ford Focuses. Officers in the posher bits of the country may have had some Volvos to play with.

In my East Riding of Yorkshire hometown of Hull, though, things were quite a bit bleaker. For reasons my youthful mind didn’t really understand, its default fleet was a rotation of Protons.

In case you’re not from the UK, or are and have purged Proton from your consciousness, the Malaysian brand was best known for producing cheap, not very cheerful and loosely slapping ‘engineered by Lotus’ on cars by means of owning the Hethel-based manufacturer.

Yet, despite the dreariness, someone responsible for vehicles within Humberside Police must’ve been a petrolhead. As well as a couple of unmarked Hawkeye Subaru Impreza WRX STIs in the middle of the decade (and one not-so-subtly painted black with all the comms anciliares on show), it would add what I think is the coolest police car to ever grace UK roads in 2009. That car being the 416bhp, 5.0-litre V8-powered Lexus IS F.

Oh, and before you start posting *that* Ford RS200 picture in the Facebook comments, I’m talking active service vehicles rather than ones stickered up for glossy press releases.

Sure, Lexus may have got some press out of it, but the IS F would find regular use by Humberside Police. It was bought from a local dealer and then slapped with £30,000 worth of gear needed by enforcement, before embedding itself in the consciousness of a scruffy-haired teenager who saw it in action semi-regularly, and would go on to write some words about that fact 16 years later.

Humberside Police spent 12 months evaluating a number of high-performance vehicles to replace its handful of Imprezas, which must’ve been a fantastic year to be a road traffic officer, before landing on the IS F.

It would even make a small headline in national news, although not for a great reason. In 2010, newly elected Prime Minister David Cameron used the IS F as an example of supposed frivolous spending of taxpayers’ money within the public sector. Funnily enough, it soon disappeared from service.

It did live a second life in private ownership, cropping up on the Lexus Owners Clubs forums in 2016. A check of its registration reveals it hasn’t had a valid MOT since 2018, though, implying it may have since been retired to the scrapyard in the sky. Excuse me while I take a moment to mourn.