For Collectors
Identifying, Buying and Restoring Police Cars
Start with the thing that makes all of this harder than it looks. A police package was running gear, not bodywork. It was an option code applied to an ordinary body, and in the 1950s especially, nothing about the outside of the car identified it at all.
Which means the black-and-white paint, the pillar spotlight and the roof beacon are decoration rather than evidence. All three can be added to any car in a weekend, and they are, constantly and often perfectly honestly. What actually separates a genuine agency car from a convincing tribute is the hardware underneath, the code stamped on the identification tag, and the paperwork behind it.
These pages cover that, in the order a careful buyer would work through it.
Start here
What Is a Police Package Car?
What was actually in the box: suspension, cooling, charging, brakes and the one instrument that counted as legal evidence. And why none of it showed from outside.
Read →The method
How to Identify a Genuine Police Package Car
What is checkable, what proves nothing, and the physical scars left behind when equipment was removed. Plus one phrase in every listing that certifies nothing at all.
Read →The reference
Police Package Option Codes
A38, 9C1, SSP and the codes around them. Where each manufacturer put the tag, why the codes are era-specific, and the dating error almost everyone repeats.
Read →Before you buy
Buying a Vintage Police Car
How to read the claim before you read the car, why tributes are fine and descriptions are the problem, and where the value actually sits.
Read →Once you own one
Restoring a Police Car
What to preserve, what to replace, and what not to improve away. The faults that are the point, and the dating problem that catches careful restorers.
Read →If you want to see one
Where These Cars Survive
The museums with genuine vehicle collections, why so few of these cars still exist, and what to check before you drive a long way to see one.
Read →Also useful
The Videos
Individual histories of the cars themselves, from the 1899 Akron patrol wagon to the last big rear-drive sedans, each with its sources listed.
Browse →Three things worth knowing before you start
Assume unproven until documented. Police cars were consumed rather than preserved. A department bought a car to work it, ran it until it failed, and sold what was left into taxi service, a small-town fleet, a demolition derby, or to a wrecker who wanted the driveline. Survival rates are poor, and worst for exactly the years collectors want. That is not cynicism about sellers, most of whom are honest. It is the state of the record.
Tributes are legitimate. Descriptions are the problem. A carefully built tribute car, described as a tribute, is a good thing to own, and many of the best-known police cars at shows are exactly that. The difficulty only arises when a car is sold as a genuine agency vehicle without documentation, because the buyer inherits that problem at resale.
Value follows paperwork, not paint. Documentation first, then correct period equipment, then originality of the driveline. A well-documented ordinary police car is worth more, and far easier to sell, than an undocumented desirable one.
You will not find prices anywhere on this site, and the book does not print them either. A figure published today is wrong within a year and misleading for a decade, and the market for these cars is thin enough that a handful of sales can move it. What does not change is the hierarchy above.
The reference version
These pages cover the method. The Golden Age covers the data: what each manufacturer’s package actually contained, where the codes sit and how they changed by year, the VIN conventions that support or undermine a claim, and a full chapter on buying and verifying.
Sixteen chapters on the American police car from 1946 to 1978, every claim checked against two independent sources, and twenty-one things commonly printed wrong about these cars listed openly at the back with sources.
See the ebook