Police is a much better word for this, IMHO. :) To spell it out, it's an adjective (e.g police car) verb (e.g. police the streets) and obviously a noun. Buffalo has never struck me as a very good verb...
Here in the UK, I've never seen buffalo used as a verb, so the buffalo sentence has never seemed all that clever to me.
I've always preferred the publican's complaint - "This sign is painted wrong, you missed the spaces between Dog and and, and and and Duck" - because it doesn't rely on unmarked compounds like police-police or Buffalo-buffalo no-one uses outside linguistic puzzles :)
You could tack on several more if the fragment being corrected is "...conjunctions like butandandandor..." so that they are missing spaces between but and and, and and and and, and and and and, and and and or, and commas would help immensely.
It's subjective of course, but for me buffalo is more satisfying because the noun, adjective and verb are all totally different words, whereas for police they're all variants of the same root.
I'm pretty sure all variants of buffalo are from the same root?
Edit: A buffalo is a member of a number of species of large antelope, to buffalo is to either act as a buffalo or hunt buffalo, and Buffalo is any of several places where there used to be a lot of buffalo before people buffaloed them to near extinction.
On the other hand, there's a town in Poland called Police...
Although antelope and buffalo are both in the family bovidae, a buffalo isn't a large antelope. That's especially true of the animals that Americans call buffalo and antelope, where Antilocapra isn't even in that same family.
"An antelope is a member of a number of even-toed ungulate species indigenous to various regions in Africa and Eurasia. Antelopes comprise a wastebasket taxon (miscellaneous group) within the family Bovidae, encompassing those Old World species that are not cattle, sheep, buffalo, bison, or goats."
- they're defined by where they're from and what they aren't. There are 91 species. So, for example, a gnu (wildebeest) is an antelope.
"alarm, overawe," 1900, from buffalo (n.). Probably from the animals' tendency to mass panic. Related: Buffaloed; buffaloing.
Buffalo
city in western New York state, U.S., of disputed origin (there never were bison thereabouts), perhaps from the name of a native chief, or a corruption of French beau fleuve "beautiful river."
I don't think it makes sense to say that "police" is an adjective in the same sense that "happy" is an adjective. Otherwise all nouns are also adjectives. _Any_ noun in English can be placed in front of another noun to serve as an attribute, because that is a feature of English syntax, but that is different from the distinction between nouns and adjectives as classes of words. The decision to use the word "adjective" both for the part of speech and for the syntactical role is a mistake.
I've always preferred the publican's complaint - "This sign is painted wrong, you missed the spaces between Dog and and, and and and Duck" - because it doesn't rely on unmarked compounds like police-police or Buffalo-buffalo no-one uses outside linguistic puzzles :)