Keeping the peace.

Belgium came out of the war policing with American Jeeps, and by 1951 they were finished. The gendarmerie's replacements were left-hand-drive export 80-inch Series Is delivered through Minerva of Antwerp and painted Blue Piletta, with painted coats of arms, a spotlight, a jerry can and a flashing blue light on a short mast above the windscreen. Inside sat a police radio and a medical kit clamped to the door: a patrol car equipped to arrive and help, not to pursue.

Colonial and Commonwealth forces followed the same logic at scale. The Royal Hong Kong Police ran long-wheelbase Series Land Rovers in their hundreds from the 1960s into the 1990s, in the force's post-1967 dark navy with bilingual POLICE signs and roof loudspeakers; the Series III 109 was the fleet standard of the 1970s and 1980s. Even the British Army of the Rhine found a policing use for a Series IIA 88, rebuilt black in its own workshops as a ceremonial and security car for royal visits.

The Shorland began as an RUC requirement of the early 1960s for an armoured car for internal security and border patrol. Frederick Butler and the RUC's engineers worked the concept up through three prototypes on a long-wheelbase Series II, and Short Brothers & Harland of Belfast put the result into production in October 1965 on the 109-inch Series IIA military chassis: 7.25 mm armour, a Ferret-style turret with a .30 in Browning, about 100 built. The first entered RUC service on 30 March 1966; the survivors passed to the Ulster Defence Regiment in 1970.

The Mark 2 of 1967 thickened the plate to 8.25 mm on the same chassis and four-cylinder engine, but it was the six-cylinder Mark 3 from 1969 that sold — over 500, most on Series III chassis, to armies and police forces around the world. The Dutch Rijkspolitie kept them at Schiphol for anti-hijack and aircraft-escort work with an MP5 in the turret. A turretless demonstrator of 1968 opened a second branch: the enclosed Shorland Armoured Personnel Vehicle, sold from 1974 as the SB301, an eight-man box with eight gun ports and, notoriously, no powered ventilation. The RUC bought three; the RAF Police used them to guard special-weapons sites.

As the threat in Northern Ireland grew, the RUC's own workshops turned ordinary Series III 109 hard tops into armoured cars with the Hotspur kit — bolted ballistic steel over the sides and doors, a second armoured roof, mesh over screen, grille and lamps — on the Stage One V8 chassis, in RUC grey. It was produced in bulk in the late 1970s and was the fleet's backbone until it wore out.

Shorts took the V8 too. The Mark 4 of 1980 was the last of the leaf-sprung turreted Shorlands, its radiator pushed well forward to clear the bigger engine — the forward grille, recessed door handles and 'bug eye' sidelights are how you tell one from a Mark 3. The SB401 did the same for the enclosed body and, at last, added a roof extractor fan in an armoured cowl.

When Land Rover replaced the Series III with the coil-sprung One Ten in 1983, police forces followed the path they had trodden since the Series I. Cumbria Constabulary's white One Ten station wagon, with its orange-and-blue chequer and an oversized roof beacon, was photographed halted on the M6 over Shap — England's highest motorway ground, where the force's Ford traffic cars could not always cope. The Mersey Tunnels Police took a 90 hard top; the MoD Police Special Escort Group rode with the Trident warhead convoys in stretched, armoured Range Rover Classics converted by MacNeillie of Walsall.

In Belfast the Hotspur fleet was wearing out and its planned replacement, the Simba, was slow to build. The RUC's answer was the Tangi — Swahili for 'tank' — designed and built in-house at Seapark by transplanting Hotspur armour from worn-out Series IIIs onto about a hundred new One Ten chassis, then fabricating new armour when the donor kits ran out. The first went into action on 16 January 1986; several hundred followed, upgraded through the 1990s and 2000s. Shorts, meanwhile, moved its whole range onto the Defender 110 as the Series 5 — the turreted S51 and S52, the white S54 anti-hijack car with a sniper's aperture in the turret, the S53 missile carrier and the eight-man S55 — until Belfast production ended in 1996.

Once the Tdi Defender arrived, the 110 station wagon became the default four-wheel-drive police car across half of Europe. Croatia's police caged theirs in mesh guards during the 1990s; Bulgaria's border police took grey-green 110s with EU-funded equipment after accession in 2007, and Sofia's city police ran white-and-green hard tops. Portugal's Guarda Nacional Republicana, which polices the 94 per cent of the country outside the cities, put a blue bar over the windscreen of a dark green 110; Poland's Straż Graniczna patrols the Kaliningrad frontier in the same vehicle with a winch on the bumper.

Smaller forces bought the short one. San Marino's Polizia Civile and Livigno's municipal police both chose Defender 90 station wagons in white with the local band and blue beacons. Two Iberian oddities sit here too: Norfolk Constabulary's Santana PS-10, a Spanish-built 110 that wore a POLICE band and no blue light at all, and the Policía Militar Aníbal, Santana's last vehicle in army green with white PM markings and a blue bar. And at the top of the range, Cheshire's Range Rover L322 stood for the motorway flagship every big English force ran in Battenburg.

The Tangi's replacement came in two flavours from two Dorset and Scottish firms. OVIK's Pangolin, on the heavy-duty Puma-era Defender 110 chassis, began replacing the RUC-era cars with the Police Service of Northern Ireland from 2011; Penman Engineering challenged the contract and from 2012 built thirty very similar six-seat Armoured Land Rover Mk.4s of its own. Otokar in Turkey, which had built the Shorland S55 under licence since the 1980s, was still selling its Akrep descendant to the Turkish National Police.

English forces armoured a handful of Defenders for armed policing and airport work — Greater Manchester's blue-grey 110s at Manchester Airport, Staffordshire's black composite-armoured wagon, Guernsey's £180,000 protected vehicle bought in 2012 to reach casualties in an armed incident and never yet used in anger. The last Puma Defenders went to specialists: the Met's Marine Policing Unit launched its boats on the Thames with a winch-fronted 110, and the Hong Kong Police bomb squad ran a three-axle Defender 130 with a tall white box body.