Should and are police officers required to turn their lights on if they are on a emergency call?

No, there are several different types of calls. If you receive a call for a burglary in process you do not run with lights and sirens. It kind of defeats the purpose if they can hear you coming from ten blocks away. Usually lights only go on at intersections or to move drivers over.

The answer is in most situations "no", but in some "yes".

Generally, lights and sirens are a police department's immunity from being sued if there is an accident while enroute to the emergency.

If there is a high-speed pursuit, my department requires by policy that both lights and sirens be used. Because we are an urban department, pursuits often pose threats to the public safety. Thus, pursuits may only occur according to very specific criteria, as a means of protecting the public.

There are some situations where a police officer needs to respond to an emergency call in an expedient manner, but the use of lights and/or siren may not be prudent. A crime in progress that may put someone's safety in jeopardy if the violator hears or sees the police coming is an example (an armed robbery or hostage situation). Each call is different and presents it's own set of circumstances. Police officers are required to weigh the merits of each and decide how to respond. We deal with circumstances that other emergency responders (fire and ambulance) do not.

No we are not required to turn our lights on if we're on an emergency call.

Often when we are coming into the area of a hot call, burg or robbery in progress we don't want to give the offender notice that we are in the area.

As for the turning our lights on to go thru a stop sign or red light. I do it on a regular basis, often we are dispatched to calls that require a fast response but do not warrant a code run.

No we are not required, and No we should not be required..

Officer Safety is one reason , for instance, if we are enroute to a Bank Robbery, or Other situation where we will be approaching them, if we run lights and sirens we might as well just get on the phone and call them to let them know we are on the way.. This give the bad guys the tactical advantage because they can set-up on us and gun us down before we even know whats happened.

Secondly, PEOPLE CAN NOT DRIVE.. If you have NEVERRRRRR tried driving down the road with blue lights and sirens, I urge you to try..

Morons will STOP right in the MIDDLE of the damn road.. they refuse to pull over, or you end up with 10 people FOLLOWING you because they want to find out whats going on..

So yes there are times when a blue light and a siren are just flat out inappropriate..

Eeerrr, NO!

I’m getting a bit tired of the stupidity and arrogance of people who are completely clueless making these silly proclamations.

As the other officers have already said there are many reasons for NOT having your emergency lights on, these are for your safety as well as for ours.

Next time maybe ask the question “Why do cops something respond to emergencies without their emergency light on?” Then we would explain the reasons why, without us having to deal with all the damn accusations and arrogance.

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Thank you for re- titling your question! As you can see from some of the post there are some nuts that like to take shots at cops. We really want to help answer questions of the public, that’s why we are taking some of our free time here.

you ought to deliver an annonymous letter to the right state government with the call of the intersection you witnessed this at, the license of the vehicle pushed, and the time. might paintings. basically dont go away your handle or something that should steer the letter decrease back to you. save doing this till consistent with probability something is finished.

Honestly it would depend on the situation; if it's a hostage situation, domestic dispute or some other crisis, then no they don't put the sirens on because they don't want to alert the suspect that they are coming.

It depends on the type of call your going to...in most cases, yes, and in other cases no for officer safety reasons.

They should but some cops are assholes and they just speed through the streets scaring the s**t out of people!!!