Customer Reviews

American Police Motorcycles

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The many photographs in the book are great. A great collection of photos covering 90 years of Police bikes. However the author assumes a lot of things that are not factual. Simple things like a motorcycle that has the radio speaker mounted on the handlebars he says "The red light is turned to the rear, which is a mystery to this author". He then identifies the famous picture of four 1920s police sidecar units in front of Ernest Cerini's Donora, Pennsylvania Harley dealership as "somewhere in West Virginia". He shows a photo of the Los Angeles Police Dept. Drill team on page 116 and again on page 117. but on page 117 he identifies them as riders in American Legion uniforms. He shows a photo of an officer wearing the early CHP uniform with what he identifies as a 1936 Indian Chief with early CHP logo on the gas tank. He then misidentifies the officer as a Los Angeles County Motor Patrol officer. The L.A.C.M.P was merged into the CHP six years earlier. These photo misidentifications are just part of the errors in the hastily prepared book
The photographs in this book are priceless. But don't put a lot of faith in the authors description of what is on them. The author really needs to do a lot more research on this subject and learn how to use spellchecker.

The photography is fantastic, as the other reviewers noted. I gave a copy to each of my motorcycle-enthusiast friends and they thoroughly enjoyed this book. I learned a lot about the history of police bikes and found the writing entertaining.