Police Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
This police trivia quiz has 109 free questions with answers and covers law enforcement from Bow Street to Brooklyn Nine-Nine: how Scotland Yard got its name, why officers are called bobbies, who invented the mug shot, the polygraph and the Taser, where the first 911 call was made, and which sergeant told his squad to be careful out there. It takes in the FBI, the Mounties, Interpol, the Carabinieri, Japan's kōban boxes and Ireland's unarmed Garda alongside Dragnet, Columbo, Hill Street Blues and Law & Order. It starts easy (which city is Brooklyn Nine-Nine set in?) and ends with questions for retired detectives, so it works for a police-themed party, a retirement do, a classroom civics warm-up or a themed round at quiz night. Every answer has been checked against a reference encyclopaedia entry on the force, the invention or the show, and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 109 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which nickname did London's constables take from the Home Secretary who founded their force in 1829?
Bobbies
Bobbies are named after Robert Peel, whose 1829 act created the Metropolitan Police; he had tried the idea first in Ireland in 1814, where his constables became known as 'peelers'.
Q 02Why did the Metropolitan Police's headquarters come to be called Scotland Yard?
From the street at its entrance
From the street at its entrance: the first headquarters at 4 Whitehall Place had its public entrance on Great Scotland Yard, and the street's name became shorthand for the whole force and its detectives.
Q 03Which magistrate and novelist founded the Bow Street Runners, often called London's first professional police, in 1749?
Henry Fielding
Henry Fielding, author of Tom Jones, recruited a handful of paid constables in 1749 from his Bow Street magistrate's office; his blind half-brother John carried the force on after him.
Q 04The Peelian principles behind British policing are summed up by the phrase 'policing by' what?
Consent
Consent: the seventh principle says 'the police are the public and the public are the police', so their power comes from the common approval of the public and not from the state.
Q 05The British police custodian helmet was adopted in the 1860s to replace what?
A stovepipe top hat
A stovepipe top hat, reinforced with cane, had topped the London policeman's uniform since 1829; it was reputedly strong enough to stand on as a step for peering over walls.
Q 06Interpol left the Paris area in 1989 for which French city?
Lyon
Lyon was a late stop for Interpol: founded in Vienna in 1923, it fell under Nazi control in 1938 and was moved to Berlin, then was rebuilt in Paris after the war.
Q 07What was the FBI's first official name, adopted in 1909, a year after the agency began work?
Bureau of Investigation
Bureau of Investigation was the original name, formally given in 1909 to the special-agent force Attorney General Charles Bonaparte assembled in 1908; it became the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935.
Q 08Which FBI director ran the agency for 48 years until his death in 1972?
J. Edgar Hoover
J. Edgar Hoover took charge in May 1924 and never left; in response to his long reign, Congress in 1976 limited later directors to a single ten-year term.
Q 09Which US federal law enforcement agency did the Judiciary Act of 1789 create to serve the new federal courts?
US Marshals
US Marshals were created by the Judiciary Act of 24 September 1789, and George Washington signed the first thirteen commissions within days; until 1870 they also took the national census.
Q 10The Texas Rangers trace their founding to an 1823 call to arms by which colonist, known as the Father of Texas?
Stephen F. Austin
Stephen F. Austin hired ten frontiersmen in 1823 to range over his colony in Mexican Texas and protect its settlers; the Rangers' museum and Hall of Fame is in Waco.
Q 11Where in the United States was a police department founded in 1845 on the model of London's Metropolitan Police?
New York City
New York City replaced its old night watch with a London-style municipal police in 1845, and the department has since grown into the largest city force in the United States.
Q 12The Miranda warning stems from a Supreme Court decision in which year?
1966
1966 was the year of Miranda v. Arizona, decided 5-4 on 13 June; the warning also promises a court-appointed attorney to those who cannot afford one.
Q 13Which hat completes the Royal Canadian Mounted Police's famous dress uniform?
Stetson
Stetson: the Mounties' official headgear was once a pith helmet, but men on prairie patrol bought their own wide-brimmed hats instead, and in 1904 the force made the habit official.
Q 21Which three-digit emergency number, launched in London in 1937, is the world's oldest emergency call service?
999
999 was introduced after a 1935 house fire in Wimpole Street killed five women; a neighbour who tried to ring the fire brigade had been left waiting in a queue at the telephone exchange.
Q 22In 1968 a small Alabama phone company beat which giant to the first US 911 call?
AT&T
AT&T had just announced 911 as the nationwide emergency number when the president of the Alabama Telephone Company read about the plan in a newspaper and got his own system working in Haleyville first.
Q 23Broderick Crawford's police chief barked '10-4' into his car radio in which 1950s TV series?
Highway Patrol
Q 14Ireland's police, the Garda Síochána, translate their name as what?
Guardians of the Peace
Guardians of the Peace is the usual translation of Garda Síochána, the force Michael Collins's government formed in 1922 as the Civic Guard to replace the disbanded Royal Irish Constabulary.
Q 15A kōban is a small neighbourhood police station found in which country?
Japan
In Japan, kōban are small police boxes where officers give directions and take in lost property as well as crime reports; Singapore copied the idea for its neighbourhood police posts.
Q 16The Carabinieri, instituted in 1814, are the national gendarmerie of which country?
Italy
The Carabinieri are older than Italy itself: King Victor Emmanuel I of Sardinia founded them in 1814, and at unification in 1861 they were named the first force of the new national army.
Q 17Which US state has the country's second-largest municipal police department, behind New York?
Illinois
Illinois takes second place through the police department of its largest city, which fields more sworn officers than any other US city force bar one; Los Angeles ranks third.
Q 18The first police car, an 1899 patrol wagon in Akron, Ohio, ran on what, before gasoline engines took over?
Electricity
Electricity powered the 1899 Akron patrol wagon, designed by city engineer Frank Loomis at a cost of $2,400; its first job was to pick up a drunk man at a downtown street corner.
Q 19The world's first traffic lights, installed in December 1868, stood outside which building?
The Houses of Parliament
The Houses of Parliament had gas-lit signals outside from 9 December 1868, worked by a policeman; within weeks a gas leak made one explode, badly injuring him, and the experiment was dropped.
Q 20Which colour were Glasgow's police boxes, unlike the blue ones everywhere else in Britain?
Red
Red was the colour of Glasgow's cast-iron police boxes, a few of which survive in the city centre; the blue Metropolitan Police design became famous as the TARDIS in Doctor Who.
Highway Patrol leaned so heavily on two-way radio chatter that stations showed its reruns under the title Ten-Four; police had devised the ten-codes in the late 1930s to keep radio messages short.
Q 24The Taser is named after a 1911 novel about which boy inventor?
Tom Swift
Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle starred the childhood hero of Jack Cover, who began work on his dart-firing stun gun in 1969 and named it after the book.
Q 25Which police device did Indiana State Police captain Robert Borkenstein invent in 1954?
The Breathalyzer
The Breathalyzer gave police a quick, portable test in place of the clumsier Drunkometer; Borkenstein left the force in 1958 to run Indiana University's new police administration department.
Q 26John Larson, fresh from a University of California doctorate, built his 1921 polygraph as an officer in which city's police?
Berkeley
Berkeley police chief August Vollmer encouraged John Larson's lie detector, which tracked blood pressure and breathing; Larson later called it a Frankenstein's monster for the way police came to use it.
Q 27Who developed Kevlar, the fibre in modern body armour, at DuPont in 1965?
Stephanie Kwolek
Stephanie Kwolek, a DuPont chemist, spun a thin, cloudy solution of the kind usually thrown away and got a fibre five times stronger than steel; Kevlar first replaced steel in racing tyres.
Q 28Besides his body-measurement ID system, what is French police officer Alphonse Bertillon credited with inventing?
The mug shot
The mug shot in its standard form was Bertillon's work of the 1880s; his name was later tarnished when, though no handwriting expert, he gave evidence that helped to wrongly convict Alfred Dreyfus.
Q 29Argentine police solved an 1892 murder with which evidence, a forensic first?
Fingerprints
Fingerprints: Francisca Rojas blamed another man for killing her two children, but a bloody print at the scene matched her own and she confessed; Buenos Aires province then adopted Juan Vucetich's filing system.
Q 30Which forensic technique did Alec Jeffreys discover at Leicester in 1984?
DNA profiling
DNA profiling first cleared Richard Buckland, a teenager who had confessed to one of two Leicestershire murders, and then identified the real killer, Colin Pitchfork, who was convicted in 1988.