Today we’re going to shine some light on the shadier side of LEGO City: the crooks, robbers and other lowlifes that keep the enormous police force busy. But before we get to what apparently is a crime-riddled city, let’s look at the history of LEGO’s city themes for a little context.

A Peaceful Town

When LEGO Town started in 1978, police sets were among the first wave. A boat, a few motorbikes and three different patrol cars were followed a year later by a police station and a helicopter.

Set 1786 Jailbreak Joe from 1995. Image via Brickset

Life in the town was peaceful for nearly 20 years until 1995 when Jailbreak Joe made his escape from the police in a red and black jeep. With three vehicles sent out to chase him (a car, motorbike and helicopter), we can only assume he was captured again with ease.

A few years later there was a brief outbreak of road rage, and during the 1998 World Cup a football fan was arrested but otherwise, life in LEGO Town remained quiet.

By the year 2000, LEGO Town had slowly fizzled out (LEGO land values must have plummeted or the economy somehow went bad or something). There was a last hurrah with the Arctic sub-theme, but otherwise, 2001 and 2002 saw mostly re-releases. It’s probably no coincidence that these were the years of Jack Stone—and incidentally, the years when LEGO nearly went bust. But that, as they say on YouTube, is a subject for another video.

A Widening World

In 2003, the World City theme replaced Town. This was a short-lived theme which, if you discard the polybags and promotional ones, only consisted of 20 sets.

Many of those sets were police sets that looked more like FBI than regular police. World City as a theme may not have been a lasting success but it had some interesting sets. In one set there’s an escaping prisoner, dressed in orange overalls. It’s the only time this outfit was used. (I wonder if that has anything to do with images of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay that were in the news shortly after...)

Another set was unique in a different way—a crooks’ hideout without any police minifigs! There were only bad guys included with a black and blue hovercraft and a jet ski.

Set 7033 Armoured Car Action from 2003. Image via Brickset

Set 7033 Armoured Car Action in particular doesn’t seem too remarkable from our perspective, but it created a template that has been used many times since in later sets—a robber with a vehicle, a black trike, in this case, pulling something along with him. Here it’s a safe but in other sets, it would be a section of wall pulled out by the vehicle to free prisoners or dragging an ATM.

A City in Trouble

In 2005 there was another reboot and the name changed again, this time to just City. (As you know, this name stuck. 😉) It is here where life started to get tough for the citizens of LEGO City. Taking a closer look at the cops and robbers, I used Brickset to compile a list of all the sets in the City theme that have police in them, not just in the Police sub-themes. (I started with City sets tagged ‘Police’ and then removed magazine gifts, advent calendars, unreleased sets and product collections.)

In the early years of LEGO City, there was a fairly clear release pattern for sets; one year had a wave of fire brigade sets, the next year had a wave of police-themed sets, and the third year a wave of some other theme, like Mining or Arctic. These days, there are extra Police themes like Forest Police, Sky Police and Prison Island, and more. (You name the climate and LEGO Police have probably been there!) Police sets have since started appearing outside of the regular waves, so it feels like there’s just a constant stream of police sets now.

So I turned my list into a graph to see if the data supported my gut feeling, and would you look at that!

There are indeed some Police sets every year but you can still see the recurring three-year cycle. But something must have really gone wrong in LEGO city around 2011—that’s when the explosion of sets with bad guys really took off! And yes, they were all bad GUYS in those days.

Lego City’s first female criminal. Image via Brickset

The first female criminal was a brunette biker in set 60042 High Speed Police Chase which was released in 2014. (Yep, it took three years for the baddies to recruit a woman—or maybe she was the hidden mastermind all along!) Since then, the ladies have certainly been catching up though. Apart from a blip in 2018, their numbers have been growing to the point that in 2022 more than 50% of LEGO City’s criminals were women!

The first policewoman appeared a few years earlier in another police chase set 3648 Police Chase in 2011. Interestingly, she had the same brunette hair as the first female criminal. (I wonder if she changed sides in the intervening years?)

The Getaway Cars

But enough of history—it REALLY starts to get interesting when you analyze the bad guys’ vehicles. It was surprising to me that in the first two waves of police sets in LEGO City, the baddies went without any getaway vehicles! This was a regression from the Town and World City themes that both featured bad guys on bikes that first appeared in 2011 with a jet ski, motorbikes and cars. (Maybe the bad guys decided to go green for a few years and walk?)

When they came back with vehicles, they came back in force and there was no going back. (Or perhaps, LEGO discovered that kids love things that can roll and have play features.) Since 2011, more than half of the sets with criminals came with some form of transportation, as charted below:

It won’t surprise you that the baddies of LEGO City’s most common choice of vehicle is a car. Motorbikes and ATVs are obvious choices too. But over the years there have been some more unusual vehicles: a hot air balloon for example but also a submarine, speedboats and jetskis, but also rafts and even a tyre.

60140: Bulldozer Break-In

60130: Prison Island

60126: Tire Escape

60314: Ice Cream Truck Police Chase

7286: Prisoner Transport

60045: Police Patrol

60046: Helicopter Surveillance

60066: Swamp Police Starter Set

60068: Crooks' Hideout

60071: Hovercraft Arrest

60131: Crooks Island

60137: Tow Truck Trouble

60143: Auto Transport Heist

60174: Mountain Police Headquarters

Seeing Red

But even more dominant than their choice of vehicle is the colour. More than 60% of the bad guys’ vehicles are red. And if you include different shades like dark red, that brings the total to over 75%! (Even the wheelbarrows are red!) In earlier years there was some variety with a yellow car, an orange motorbike and some olive green rubber dinghies but starting in 2011, LEGO started seeing red.

In the real world, I’d assume you’d want your getaway car to be inconspicuous. As Shannon says to Driver in the Ryan Gosling movie Drive: “Here she is, plain-jane as can be, the most popular car in the state of California, the Chevy Impala. No one will be looking at you.” In LEGO City however, the rules are different.

And they are only getting redder. Since 2017, there have been a few exceptions to the (dark) red rule. Two were brown wooden rafts. One was a black sports car in a set that also contains a red fire chief’s car and one was... an ice-cream truck. (Perhaps they are all on the same team and colour-coordinate their cars? Or maybe there is a vehicle dealer that has a red bandit discount?)

Only in the past year has the red trend faltered a bit with some variety. We’ll have to wait and see where LEGO City’s underworld goes from here as evidenced by their vehicle’s colour choice. Was 2022 a one-off year with a bit more colour? Will we see the comeback of more colourful getaway vehicles? Or will the red wave come crashing back? Only time will tell…

Red Rover, Red Rover

Researching this article was a lot of fun. It all started with an image I posted on Flickr. I had noticed the red car trend, and when I started collecting the set images on Brickset it turned out to be even more extreme than I had thought.

I then started digging deeper and learned a lot about City Police, and I even built a lot of the bad guys’ vehicles that you can see in the group photo. I don’t own most of those sets so they were built from my collection of loose parts—eagle-eyed readers may notice a few detail changes here and there.

With Valentines Day, it felt like a poignant excuse to explore why the bad guys of LEGO city enjoy red vehicles so much. Obviously, it is because they love the thrill of the chase with all of their heart!

Best of BrickNerd - Article originally published February 13, 2023.

Why do you think all the bad guys in LEGO City have red vehicles? Would you prefer a different color? Let us know in the comments.

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