About

The police cars history almost forgot

Badges & Chrome covers the vehicles that built American law enforcement, from the electric patrol wagon Akron bought in 1899 to the year the police sedan disappeared from testing altogether.

The standard

Every specific claim published here — in a video, an article, or a page of test results — is checked against two independent sources before it goes out. Three websites repeating one original claim count as one source, not three. Where the sources disagree, the page says so. Where a claim cannot be supported, it is cut rather than softened.

That is not a promise of perfection, and there are errors here. What it means is that when something turns out to be wrong, the correction is published openly, with the mistake named, rather than quietly fixed. Videos are not re-uploaded with the error removed, because that hides it rather than corrects it. Pages that are corrected say what changed.

Where the research comes from

Increasingly, from the people who were there.

A retired California Highway Patrol officer who drove Mustangs from the first cars in 1982 to the last in 1993 supplied a Ford advertisement that overturned an error repeated across the entire internet, along with photographs from his service years and a first-hand account of how the Air Force came to use these cars to chase U-2 spy planes down runways. A former Air Force security policeman explained why almost no photographs of that exist: photography was prohibited around those aircraft.

Corrections have come from viewers and readers with better documentation than mine. If you worked with these cars, what you remember is worth more than most of what has been written down. The comment section on any video works, and so does the email address at the foot of this page.

What is here

The videos are the front door. Behind them is the working archive they come from.

Every Michigan State Police vehicle evaluation that could be located, transcribed year by year from the original reports — the test archive — and the same data as a single sortable table, published under an open licence because the figures came from public documents and should go back to being public. The records, with the two measurement changes that make most published police car records wrong. Pages for the individual vehicles, each showing every test it ever sat.

Alongside those, articles on the research itself: the 1982 study that measured what a light bar costs, the federal prototype police car that was cancelled weeks before anyone drove it, the survey that found nobody could agree what a police car should look like.

And for anyone who owns one of these cars, the collector guides — what a police package actually was, how to tell a genuine one, and what a code on a tag can and cannot prove.

Why it is worth doing properly

Police cars were consumed rather than preserved. A department bought one to work it, ran it until it failed, and sold what was left into taxi service, a small-town fleet or a demolition derby. Nobody kept them, because nobody thought of them as worth keeping.

The same is true of the records. Manufacturers that built these cars no longer exist. Departments have reorganised, and their files have moved or gone. The people who drove them are, increasingly, no longer around to ask.

So the work is partly a race. Every year the sources get thinner, and every year a few more first-hand accounts stop being available. Getting it right now matters more than getting it out quickly.

A note on imagery. Period photographs of specific police cars are scarce, particularly for marques whose manufacturers are long gone. Where an image is illustrative rather than documentary, that is stated on the page, in the video, and in the description. Archive photographs are credited where used, and contributors are named when they have agreed to it.