I went out this morning to capture police lights but to my dismay there were no accidents/collisions or other traffic offenders.  I did come up with two useful ideas while just out of the house:

1) I need to generate test patterns until I can get pictures of police cars for my own development process;

a) 320x240/200 images with blue and red blurry circles applied close to each other, not so close to each other, obscured,  blurred, etc..
b) filter green components out;
c) split out red and blue planes;
d) check for red/blue within the circular Region of Interest (ROI)

2) I realized that the temporal component of watching for lights could be taken care of by overlaying multiple images onto a "working" frame that's comprised of 10 or so (TBD) images:

a) accumulate images into a queue and overlay the 1-10 images into a "working" frame that I can examine for the blue and red lights within a particular ROI on the image.
b) new images arriving will be added to the end of the queue while older images are pushed out.