On Tuesday, November 25, 2003, at 02:04 PM, Anne McCandless wrote:
Unfortuneately, Crown Victorias are one of the few full sized sedans left.
Ford also supplies a 'police package' (has to do with suspention and wiring
or some such stuff).
Conventional wisdom has it that a police car has to have a solid cart style axle in the back and a big 'ol engine in the front. Even GM and Daimler Chrysler have progressed beyond such dinosaur designs, having largely dropped their rear drive cars years ago. Ford still builds the Crown Victoria mostly for police buyers. It shares a platform with the Lincoln Town Car that mostly sells to limo operators and the odd Mercury Marquis. Many parts are shared with the Mustang, another dinosaur with an aging demographic. As GM and D-C have abandoned all these markets Ford has something of a monopoly and knows it. Unfortunately as long as police departments demand only bids for a "rear wheel drive sedan with police package" Ford has no motivation to improve their product.
Squads are used for more than just chasing other cars.
There is a little problems of transporting suspects. This is hard to do in
a pick-up. Squads need a back seat that is large enough to get a plexi
screen and steel panel behind the front seat and still leave room for an
average adult to get into the back seat. It also needs a front seat wide
enough to seat two officers and a whole bunch of equipment in between them.
This is one of the problems in choosing a squad- they have to meet a host of sometimes contradictory requirements. As for carrying suspects, one solution would be more "booking vans", another would be a crew cab pickup or smaller front wheel drive sedan. Of course, it would help if our correctional facilities wouldn't fatten the criminals up so, but then again it makes them easier to chase down. As for width, a city squad needs to be narrow- a standard Minneapolis sidewalk is 6 feet wide, and a Crown Vic won't fit. Fortunately a lot of the electronics has gotten smaller and some has moved to the trunk so a wide full size car isn't so needed.
It used to be that the squads had snow tires put on in the fall, but with
radial tires, this was deemed unnecessary. The cheapest and most efficient
answer would be chains, or better yet, studded tires. Studs are deemed too
hard on the highways, and illegal in Minnesota. If they were allowed on
emergency vehicles only, I don't think the damage would be notable.
Both the Crown Vic and the Mack have traction control, IIRC they're both supplied by Bosch. Under some conditions it's advantageous to turn the traction control off. While the Mack has a conveniently located switch on the dashboard to do that, the Crown Vic's switch is buried in the glove box- kind of hard to reach when your in the middle of a skid! I suspect the threat of losing Minneapolis next order would motivate Ford to relocate that switch to a more accessible place. As for tires, there are several winter tires that are far superior to the standard "all season" radials, and the Green Diamond brand retreads offer excellent traction and are economical as well.
The department does have some SUV's. I think all of the K-9 cars are SUVs
since Bowser makes prisoner transport unsatisfactory, anyhow.
There are usually a couple SUVs per precincts for supervisors normally, but
which the district squads use in bad weather. However, four-wheled drives
are more expensive and when you count up the number of squads needed each
year, believe me, this mounts up.
Good to see the Tahoes finally found a good use (LOL). As for cost, a 4 wheel drive extended cab Ranger sells to consumers for about $15,000, a good couple thou less than a Crown Vic. Given it's more rugged truck construction a pickup could probably survive 5 years in police use, then another 5 years in the general city motor pool. Getting 10 years out of vehicles would save us millions in vehicle replacement costs.
Since I always have lived in the city, I had the opprtunity to work every
blizzard. Oh fun!!! Now I do what I used to tell others; if you can't be
part of the solution, stay home and don't contribute to the problem.
Same here- my employers have generally insisted that their cargo be (stuck) on the road regardless of whatever blizzard was blowing. I made a fortune in overtime pay on most of our infamous blizzards, sometimes relaxing for hours while on the clock within sight of my starting point while waiting for the tow truck to come and pull me out, only to get stuck again just up the road!
In conclusion, we can get a lot better deal than blindly buying new Crown Vics all the time. We need to show the kind of leadership that years ago developed what is now called the "Minneapolis cab" for the fire service. It's high time we used our considerable wisdom to invent the "Minneapolis squad".
hanging on in Hawthorne,
Dyna Sluyter
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