An Indiana trooper who used to spend off-duty hours playing poker with my dad sometimes parked his 1957 Ford, with its siren and flasher on the roof, outside our home. I stood on tiptoes to peek through its windows at the fancy radio and the long gun mounted on the driver's door. I wondered what other magic might be inside.

Maybe not a lot, from a book I read years later about vintage patrol cars. Many were stripped-down sedans bought by budget-conscious bosses. While highway patrols favored large motors, big cities often went cheap for their side-street prowlers. Pursuits were tests of mechanical endurance as much as speed, sometimes won not by greater horsepower but better engine cooling.

Heavy duty cooling remains an integral part of the "police package," a manufacturer's term for cars or SUVs with special features that range from hardened suspension parts for curb-jumping to barf-proof plastic back seats for nauseous drunks.

In a private show last week at the America's Center downtown, more than 600 police fleet managers from across the U.S. gathered for a look at the latest versions, and tools, to fulfill the car's diverse role as office, fort, racer, radio station, jail, barricade, battering ram and more.

I took a look too, hosted by a genial retired Chicago street cop named Henry Kingwill. He is a partner in Hendon Publishing Co., which produces law enforcement magazines and sponsors the annual Police Fleet Expo.

Some observations:

• Ford and Chevrolet are stirring the market with new cars. Ford's Crown Victoria, long dominant in a market that prefers the handling of its rear-wheel drive, is being retired in favor of a front-driven "Police Pursuit" based on the Taurus. Chevy has unveiled a rear-drive Caprice (based on an Australian car not offered here) to sell beside its front-drive Impala, star of the St. Louis police fleet. Chrysler continues its rear-drive Dodge Charger, and also offers police credentials for the two-door Challenger. (Note to speeders: These have some of the quickest patrol car engines in modern memory. And you'll need to memorize the look of some new body styles.)

• Body styles won't matter when the cars light up. The low power drain, small size and dazzling effect of LED warning signals are prompting their use more than ever. I saw some flash, oscillate, alternate, whirl and do visual things for which I lack appropriate verbs — or appropriate sunglasses.

• LED spotlights have arrived too, one type fitted with a motion detector. An officer can aim it at a violator's stopped car and be alerted if someone starts moving from that direction. It could thwart an ambush on a cop distracted by writing a ticket or checking a computer.

• The modern police car cockpit has enough switches, dials and displays to baffle a 747 pilot. There are usually multiple radios, a computer, speed gun, controller for the siren/public address system and switches for various kinds of lights, directional arrows and shotgun and rifle locks. A representative from one company showed me an innovative voice command system. Spoken words manage it all with the driver's hands on the wheel and eyes on the road. (Yes, it works with the siren on.)

• Also on the safety theme were salesmen touting high-performance brakes, fuel-tank fire retardants, bullet-resistant door inserts, push bumpers, theft deterrent systems and myriad other gadgets we never saw watching "Adam-12" on TV.

• Beyond argument, the most amazing product was an automated license number checker. Using cameras mounted on the patrol car, it operates at lightning speed to run every plate it sees through a database of wanted vehicles. When it sees a hot one, it alerts the officer and flashes pictures of the plate — and the whole vehicle — onto a computer screen. (Using infrared, it operates night and day.)

Put all these things together and you can figure on spending $50,000 or more to buy and equip each car, Kingwill told me. It suggests that not a lot of those new Fords, Chevys and Dodges will receive the full treatment.

I searched the show's hardware and software displays in vain for what I figured my dad's old trooper buddy might have wanted. There wasn't a mobile video poker game in the house.