We’re not talking about way back when—until last year, this friendly police officer cruised the land of the midnight sun
Canada also had VW Beetles as actual police cars here and there, the best documented of them being one used as a patrol vehicle in Saint John, New Brunswick. There are even some stories about officers cramming arrested miscreants into the back seat, more than a bit of a squeeze.
The Yukon Beetle has a different tale to tell. It was donated – by whom is not entirely clear, but likely a retired ex-RCMP member – and went into service mostly as a community relations machine. People expected to see normal patrol cars like the Crown Victoria cruising the streets of Whitehorse, but a classic Beetle had a friendlier face for community outreach. Besides which, the popularity of the Herbie movies meant every kid knew what a Beetle was.
Some time towards the end of the 1980s, a civilian RCMP employee named Ken Jones had the bright idea to turn the donated Beetle into a real-live Herbie-RCMP mashup. A radio technician, he understood electronics, and worked with Cst. Charles Bertrand to raise money to outfit the Beetle in full RCMP livery and modify it.
Jones seems like a pretty inventive guy. He fitted the Beetle with a hidden speaker so that Bertrand could make it “talk” to passing kids at events, and wired up all the electronics to be operated remotely. The car could blink its headlights on and off independently, sound the lights and siren, and could even pretend to cry by turning on the windshield wiper.
Fitted with a special trailer for the RCMP’s safety bear mascot to ride along in, the Beetle appeared at basically every community event in Whitehorse right through until the early 2000s. If you attended Canada Day or the Sourdough Rendezvous sometime in the mid-1990s, there was every chance you could end up having a conversation with a friendly RCMP Volkswagen.
The Yukon RCMP even went so far as to create hockey cards with its police Beetle on them (peak Canadian stereotype) and hand them out to kids everywhere it appeared. The livery was changed from the older navy blue of the RCMP to the modern white background with coloured stripes sometime in the mid-1990s. Later in its service, the Beetle was part of drug awareness and educational programs.
Thus, while it was never actually a patrol vehicle, the Yukon’s RCMP Beetle did its part. As of 2023, it ended its watch, and is now in the possession of the Yukon transportation museum, which currently has it on display.
According to the Yukon RCMP’s media relations department, one of the other unusual vehicles that used to be in the fleet was a camper trailer used for patrolling the Dempster Highway. Officers and their families would both camp and patrol along its length, a sort of frontier-style perk of the job. With further professionalization of modern policing, the practice went away.
Which, along with the retirement of the RCMP Beetle, is kind of a shame. There’s not a great deal of room for whimsy in modern police work, but maybe there should be. We have enough hard-bitten and ultra-gritty cop shows out there, but who wouldn’t love to see a remake of Due South, with its by-the-book Mountie in red serge? Or a kids’ show about a crime-fighting, self-aware Volkswagen?
If you grew up in the Yukon, maybe you remember the RCMP’s Beetle. If you didn’t, there’s still something fun about a 1962 classic all dressed up like it was about to head out and investigate whether the cremation of Sam McGee was a cover-up. There are strange things done in the land of the midnight sun — and this VW Beetle is on the case.
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