What We Know About This Police 'Side Car Jail'

Claims that a black-and-white photo shows a "police paddywagon" in the 1920s have long circulated online. In December 2024, various throwback (archived) accounts (archived) shared the image claiming it had been 100 years since it was taken.

One such account captioned the image, "Los Angeles Police (LAPD) officers now have motorcycle paddywagons, and they can throw criminals in innovative sidecar cages."

(X user @100YearsAgoLive)

Searches using the reverse image search engine TinEye and the Internet Archive's WayBack Machine, a digital archive of web pages, unearthed versions of the image on blogs and other websites as early as 2006.

As of this writing, it exists on a variety of reputable photo agency sites, including Getty, Alamy and Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo, a photo agency for a German newspaper, and historical documentation confirms the photo's legitimacy. All such sources describe the image as showing a police sidecar cell or cage in Los Angeles in 1924. 

While we have no reason to doubt the photo's authenticity, it's unknown whether it depicts a staged scene or an actual arrest.

We also don't know if, or how often, police in Los Angeles actually used the equipment to detain people. We reached out to the Los Angeles Police Department for more information, and the agency referred us to the Los Angeles Police Museum. We will update this report if we receive a response.

While Getty, Alamy and Süddeutsche Zeitung all said the image was taken in 1924, Getty provided a specific date: Dec. 20, 1924. 

Getty said it obtained the photo when the agency acquired the Hulton Archive, an archive of photojournalism, and that the image was originally owned by the Topical Press Agency, a British photo agency that closed in 1957.

The original photographer was unknown, as well as the exact location of the scene in Los Angeles.

According to a document once owned by the Hulton Archive (photographed below by a Getty staff member), the in-question image shows a "side car jail invented for tag tearing traffic law violators," reading:

SIDE CAR JAIL INVENTED FOR TAG TEARING TRAFFIC LAW VIOLATORS.

A new and drastic method of handling "tag tearing" motorists was demonstrated at Los Angeles. The device, is the brainchild of I.M. Service, of that City, designed to deal with transient motorists who shatter the speed and parking laws. It is a "side car cell."

The car is detachable, and replaces the ordinary side car. [...]

(Getty Images Hulton Archive)

Searches for "I.M. Service" in Los Angeles on Google and Newspapers.com did not yield any further information about the equipment. 

A similar "side car jail" also appeared in a compilation of historical footage owned by Periscope Film. The in-question clip shows a police officer on a motorbike pulling over a driver and detaining him in the contraption. The company said the clip was recorded in 1924, the same year as the in-question photo.