But these days, the boys in blue refer to a different uniformed team.
I found him in Bra doing brisk business with his nattily uniformed team, got the short answer, and followed up last week with a long phone call to his maturing caves in Roanne, near Lyon.
The unit has also drawn on information from uniformed surveillance teams and telephone taps, informants in political groups, and companies to amass the secret files.
By January 1997, he had been transferred to the Tracer Unit in the 33rd Precinct in Washington Heights, a uniformed narcotics team that saturates neighborhoods after intensive undercover drug operations and focuses on quality-of-life violations.
And suddenly, within the uniform, uniformed mass, he appears.
The prison is organised into five wings, each a self-contained community of roughly 40 men, staffed by a security team of uniformed officers and a clinical team of therapists.
He worked for the Indian Packing Company who uniformed the town team as an advertising investment.
And if for some reason they don't, then White knows just the well-trained team of uniformed men who can put them straight.
Since spending the 1951 season in the military, Ford had attended every Yankees spring training until this year, first as a player, then as a coach, then as a uniformed guest of the team's owners, in part to display the franchise's great history.
This is who we are and how we are: every different city a different super-club with a team of uniformed bouncers, a row of taxis hovering like seagulls on a picnic, a queue of plumed of cigarette smoke rising above sharp gelled hair.
