Police van
vehicle used by police to carry prisoners
A police van is a van operated by police. A police van might also be known as a paddy wagon, divisional van, patrol van, patrol wagon, police wagon, Black Mariah/Maria, police carrier, pie wagon (in old-fashioned usage), or squadrol (a unique term used by the Chicago Police Department). Police vans are usually employed for the transport of prisoners inside a specially adapted cell in the vehicle, the rapid transport of a number of officers to an incident, or to carry and move equipment.
History
The precursor to police vans were police horse-drawn carriages, with the carriage serving as a secure mobile holding cell to transport arrested suspects. The American inventor Frank Fowler Loomis designed the first motorized patrol wagon out of a panel truck for the Akron Police Department in 1899. These trucks became known as "pie wagons" due to their fancied resemblance to delivery vans used by bakeries.
Early police vans were usually crudely adapted for accommodation of prisoners. The need for a secure police van was realized when prisoners who were resisting arrest needed to be transported. The concern was that if transported in a conventional patrol car, the prisoner might attack the officers during the journey. To combat this, police vans were designed with a fixed steel cage in the rear of the vehicle, effectively separating the prisoner from the officers.
The public source identifies “Police van” as vehicle used by police to carry prisoners. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Police, vehicle and used.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1023646. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1899.
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This entry incorporates text from “Police van” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.