Police van

[1] These panel trucks became known as "pie wagons", due to their fancied resemblance to delivery vans used by bakeries.

[2] In the modern age, motorised police vans replaced the older Black Maria and paddy wagon types as they were usually crudely adapted for accommodation of prisoners.

To combat this, police vans were designed with a fixed steel cage in the rear of the vehicle effectively separating the prisoner from the officers.

Black Maria (horse) – beginning with an 1832 appearance in Niles Weekly Register (October 10) and then again in Colburn's New Monthly Magazine and Humorist (1841).

[8] Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable suggests the name came from Maria Lee, a large and fearsome black keeper of a sailors' boarding house whom the police would call on for help with difficult prisoners.

The English translation of the French detective novel Monsieur Lecoq, published in 1868 by Émile Gaboriau, uses the term Black Maria when referring to a police van.

Goodbye to the Brixton sun"The song refers to the London police tendency of using citizen possession of a firearm to justify use of lethal force, therefore "No need for the Black Maria", i.e. no need to arrange for transporting anyone to custody because the police will not attempt to bring them in alive.

Police vans may have a flip down wire shield across the windscreen,[11] which helps prevent projectiles from damaging the vehicle.