No blue balls for me!

I took a ride in a police car yesterday. In the front seat.

Actually, it wasn't a car so much as an SUV. The assistant campus police chief was at the same webinar I was, and he offered me a ride back to my office, since he was heading to the same complex. We had a nice conversation.

It disappoints me a little that police forces (at least in our part of the country) are doing away with the big, rotating lights on the rooves of their cars, like Kojak used to have. (I felt the same way when freight companies did away with caboose... cabooses... cabeese?) My friend Gimpy calls them "cherries and blue balls" -- but he's the only one I've heard refer to them that way. Instead, police cars now have LED bars. Our campus police SUV's have them mounted on the grills, between the headlights, because, I was told, the SUV's are so high off the ground that the roof lights wouldn't be seen by smaller cars.

All this is well and good, but do LED's give the full 360-degree warning that the rotating lights used to? If I'm in traffic and hear a siren and don't see lights in front of or behind me, will I know that a police car is passing on a cross street?

Any of you have experience with these new things?