About the research
How These Videos Are Researched
Badges & Chrome tells the history of American police vehicles: the machines, the departments, and the decisions behind them. This page explains where the information comes from, how it is checked, and what happens when we get it wrong.
Why it needs doing
The police car is the most familiar machine in American life and one of the least examined. Manufacturers’ records are patchy, department archives are scattered, and a great deal of what circulates online is repetition rather than research. A figure gets published once, gets quoted, gets quoted again, and forty years later it is simply what everybody knows.
The original documents usually still exist, and almost nobody reads them. Where a fact is well established, we state it plainly. Where it is not, we say that too.
How a video gets made
01
Research first
Before a script is written, the core claims are checked against published automotive history, period magazines and department publications, marque-club archives, museum records, and primary sources wherever they exist.
02
Write, then verify again
Once drafted, each script goes through a second pass in which every number, date and named person is re-checked. Claims that do not hold up are removed or hedged, not softened quietly, but explicitly marked as uncertain.
03
Hedge honestly
Where accounts conflict, the script says so. You will hear phrases like “usually traced to”, “reportedly” and “according to lore”. These are deliberate. They mark the boundary between what is documented and what is repeated.
04
Cite on the page
Every video has a page on this site listing the sources behind it. If a claim on this site is not sourced, it should not be there.
The two-source rule
Every specific claim needs two independent sources before it goes to air. Three websites repeating one original claim is one source, not three.
That applies to numbers, dates, technical specifications, cause-and-effect claims, superlatives and attributed quotes. It does not apply to general narrative or obviously uncontroversial background, because nothing would ever get made.
Primary sources come first
The single most useful lesson of the last year is that published secondary sources about police cars are wrong far more often than they should be, and that the original documents are frequently free to anyone who looks.
The largest example is the Michigan State Police annual vehicle evaluation, which has tested police cars since the 1950s and publishes the results. That archive here runs from 1978 to the present, and it has repeatedly overturned figures that circulate everywhere:
- The Mustang SSP’s famous 6.3-second acceleration figure turned out to be zero to fifty, not zero to sixty. Ford’s own 1982 advertisement says so in print, and Michigan’s stopwatch agrees: 7.64 seconds to sixty.
- The Ford Crown Victoria, which dominated American policing for two decades, ran about 129 mph, well below the cars it outlived.
- The Dodge Diplomat, remembered as slow, was first or second in its class in 1982 and 1983, beating a 350-cubic-inch Impala by thirteen miles an hour.
Alongside those: manufacturer press releases and fleet literature, agency purchasing specifications, court decisions, period press, and museum and departmental archives. Where a document exists, it is used in preference to anyone’s summary of it.
One rule learned the hard way. An organisation describing its own history is a secondary source for that history. A current test book saying “the criteria have historically been” is evidence of what the criteria are now, not of what they were. Only the contemporaneous document settles the past.
What we are careful about
A few areas come up repeatedly, and they are worth naming.
Production numbers
Factory records from the 1930s to the 1970s are frequently incomplete or contradictory. Where sources disagree, we give the range and say which figure is documented rather than picking the most impressive one.
“Firsts”
Claims that something was the first police car, the first radio car or the first police package are often disputed, and the answer usually depends on definitions. We say “among the first” or “usually credited to” unless the record is genuinely clear.
Famous stories
Some of the best-known anecdotes in automotive history are folklore. Where a story is beloved but unproven, a letter, a nickname, a quote, we tell it and label it as disputed rather than dropping it or passing it off as fact.
Period imagery
Some imagery used in the videos and on this site is illustrative rather than a photograph of the specific vehicle discussed. Archival photographs are credited where used.
Where the research comes from now
Increasingly, from the people who were there. That is not a courtesy.
A retired California Highway Patrol officer who drove Mustangs from the first cars in 1982 to the last in 1993 supplied the 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.
If you worked with these cars, what you remember is worth more than most of what has been written down.
Corrections
We get things wrong.
When that happens, the correction is made on the page and noted, and where the error is substantive, acknowledged in the video’s comments. Videos are not re-uploaded with the mistake quietly removed, because that hides the error rather than fixing it. Viewers have already corrected details on this channel, and those corrections have improved the work.
If you have spotted something, say so. A source or a citation is enormously helpful, but a clear explanation of what is wrong is welcome on its own.
Every correction published so far →
Send a correction →
What this does not claim
It does not claim the videos are free of error. They are not, and the corrections page lists what has been found.
It does not claim every statement is double-sourced. Narrative connective tissue is not, and could not be.
And it does not claim the standard is unusually high in absolute terms. It is ordinary practice. It only looks unusual in this subject, because so much automotive history is written by enthusiasts repeating each other in good faith.
Who makes this
Badges & Chrome is an independent research and documentary project. It is not affiliated with any law-enforcement agency, manufacturer, museum or archive. No manufacturer or department has any input into what the videos say.