One behind-the-scenes aspects of the Springfield Police Department is its mechanics. A police official back in 2005 suggested I do a story on the state of the department’s patrol cars. Floors were rusting out, engines had a huge number of miles on them and interiors were falling apart.

In tough economic times, replacing police patrol cars is nearly impossible for local governments. Springfield was supposed to have a five-year plan for rotating cars in and out, but it had not adhered to the plan. At the time of this story, the department had not gotten new patrol cars in five years.

I spent an afternoon at the department’s garage and was struck by how hard the mechanics work and how creative they could be with replacing parts and making do with what was on hand.

Fleet weak / Police mechanics forced to improvise to keep aging cars on road
Oct. 3, 2005

If you can imagine a flock of buzzards picking at a pile of bones, then it’s not much of a stretch to visualize what the Springfield Police Department’s mechanics do every day.

A row of seven retired Chevrolet Caprices and Ford Crown Victorias are lined up in a corner of the garage property on Singer Avenue. They’re squad cars that, just since June, have been deemed no longer safe for officers to drive, primarily because of rust problems.

They will be joined by five more by March, mechanics estimate.

The cars are dead in terms of their usefulness to patrol officers. They have rusty floorboards and body mounts, leaky trunks and failing engines. Their job now is to provide a pool of parts – everything from engines, doors and steering columns right down to light bulbs, radio knobs and seats – for mechanics who are doing all they can to keep the department’s fleet of aging patrol cars running in the safest, yet most economical, manner possible.

“It’s like a small little scrap yard back there some days,” said Dave Lawler, assistant superintendent for fleet maintenance at the police department. “We try and cut down on the expense as far as trying to buy new parts to put in old cars. We estimate a savings of $1,500 to $2,000 each month by using used parts.”

The Springfield Police Department has 250 vehicles in its inventory, of which 94 (38 percent) have more than 90,000 miles. Most of those – 68, to be exact – have more than 100,000 miles.

The fleet is aging quickly; 157 of the vehicles are models from 1994 to 1999. And as the cars continue to age, the pool of available used parts continues to shrink because those that are still out there, whether they’re part of the department’s fleet or sitting in a scrap yard someplace, are wearing out or getting wrecked at the same rate.

“We’re to the point where we’ve been keeping a lot of these cars alive through cannibalized parts,” said deputy chief Pat Fogleman, who heads the department’s administrative services division. “The problem is, our supply of cannibalized parts is drying up fast.”

The problem is going to worsen unless the city can come up with enough money to enable the department to begin buying 50 to 60 new cars each year and rotating the same number out of use. The department just received 10 new 2006 Crown Victorias at a final cost of $24,635 each after being equipped with lights, sirens, antennas and other necessities.

Previous five-year plans for the department have called for replacing patrol cars every four years, which is an accepted standard among police agencies and mechanics.

The last time the department got a significant number of new vehicles was in 2000, when the city bought 45 cars.

The department has numerous Crown Victorias, many of which have a problem with rusty frames. Their Chevrolets from 1994 have problems with rusty floorboards and body mounts. During the current budget year alone, the department has had to retire 10 cars because of rusty frames, Fogleman said.

In June, an officer was driving a 1996 Crown Victoria patrol car with 101,000 miles on it when the ball joint flew off. The officer lost control and hit a utility pole. He wasn’t injured, but officials are concerned about the possibilities.

“That’s the guys’ office for eight hours a day. If you were in a beater car with knobs breaking off, a radio that doesn’t work, maybe the window rolls down, maybe it doesn’t…” Fogleman said. “I think the guys understand times are tough. I don’t think a lot of people understand the abuse these vehicles go through.”

Patrol cars frequently are left idling while officers respond to calls or block off traffic, primarily because the lights and other equipment would quickly drain the batteries if the engines were turned off. An hour of idling is the equivalent of 33 miles of wear on a car, Lawler said.

Officers also often rapidly accelerate from a dead stop and/or quickly brake while speeding to a call. The equipment they carry on their belts – guns, handcuffs, pepper spray – has been known to rip the seat fabric.

The cars are driven every day in all kinds of weather. Water gets thrown up onto the underside of the cars, causing them to rust through and allowing water to seep into the trunks.

In at least one case, the front floorboard of a car rusted completely through, exposing carpet to the catalytic converter and melting the carpet.

Some squad cars use large amounts of oil between oil changes. One car used 33 quarts of oil, not counting oil changes, during a six-month period. Others were recorded as using 17, 22 and 23 additional quarts, respectively, during the same time frame.

Some cars – 25 of them, shared by all three shifts – are used as take-home vehicles, and some argue that mileage on those cars could be curtailed if officers weren’t allowed to drive them off duty. Fogleman said quite the opposite is true – take-home cars aren’t driven nearly as much as those used round-the-clock.

“The off-duty mileage really is a small part of the whole mileage thing,” he said. “We have found that the cars are much better maintained and last longer because ‘It’s mine, I can be held accountable for it.’ If you drive a fleet car, you park it at the end of the shift, and you don’t really care.”

Lawler said the best thing that could happen is the city would get in the habit of purchasing a group of new cars every year.

“Fifty cars right now would be a big help,” he said.

In the meantime, the department’s mechanics – perhaps “magicians” is a better description – will forge on. They will continue stockpiling used speedometer clusters, brackets, outside mirrors and flywheels. They will prepare for the next time they’re forced to fabricate a floorboard or trunk out of an old street sign. And they will remember that there likely will come another day when they must completely overhaul a patrol car with new doors, a new engine and a new rear axle.

“We have people who are willing to understand the importance of the savings,” Lawler said. “They’ve gone the extra mile in getting the cars back out on the road. We’ve done a lot of different things to try to save as much as we can.”