page_title: Police van
section_title: Paddy wagon
hierarchical_section_title: Police van / Etymology / Paddy wagon
caption_attribution_description: English: Van of Kolkata Police at Dalhousie East.Made on a Tata 407 chassis, like this other Indian police van.
context_page_description: A police van is a type of vehicle operated by police forces. Police vans are usually employed for the transport of prisoners inside a specially adapted cell in the vehicle, or for the rapid transport of a number of officers to an incident.
context_section_description: The precise origin of the term is uncertain and disputed, though its use dates back to the 1800s.
  There are three theories as to how the term originated.
  One theory holds that "paddy wagon" was simply a shortening of "patrol wagon," in the same way police cars are called patrol cars today.
  In the United States, "Paddy" was a common Irish shortening of Padraig, (Patrick in English), which was most often used in the 19th century as an ethnic slur to refer to Irish people.
  Over half the people arrested in New York in the 1840s and 1850s were Irish, so that police vans were dubbed “paddy wagons” and episodes of mob violence in the streets were called “donnybrooks,” after a town in Ireland.
caption: A police van in India
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