Page 422 - NIXBOOK

At the conferences, because most of the DARE Officers brought their families and their cool cars, it was a tradition to have a
procession to the weekend picnic. For the parade staging all the DARE police cars would line up and then turn on all their
emergency lights and flashers.

There were a lot of converted police or patrol vehicles, others were sports cars seized from drug dealers. There were sport utility
vehicles, pickup trucks, a few other minivans, and station wagons. For you visual learners, I present these vintage photos:

During the parade we’d all cycle through our different siren sounds. Can you imagine several dozen police cars, all with different
tones of sirens wailing and blaring completely out of sync with each other? The local police hosting agency would block
intersections off for us as we went through the town and it absolutely always attracted a ton of attention; people would pour out
of business and houses and wave and we’d all wave back. Invariably the routes would also include a side detour into at least one
bad part of town to freak out the local drug dealers who of course would completely panic, hearing several dozen police sirens
getting louder and closer to them. We just knew large quantities of drugs were getting frantically flushed down toilets in
complete panic, and then we’ve drive by, smiling and waving with our lights and sirens going and most of the drug dealers and
drugs users would just stand there on their porches trying to act casual while being completely befuddled by the whole scene
while we headed to our picnic.

See the cute Volkswagen Beetle there? That was a pretty unique design; a new car dealership in Bellevue had loaned the car to
the Bellevue Police DARE unit. Then somebody submitted some pictures of it to the Matchbox toy car company for consideration
in their special release DARE car collection. The Bellevue Beetle was chosen as one of 6 nationwide winners, and Matchbox
released a couple little versions of it over the couple years. They looked like this: