The Times recently reported that police departments are assigning officers the last of the Ford Crown Victorias, thereby signalling the end for one of law enforcement’s most iconic vehicles. Produced by Ford from 1979 to 2011, the heavyset sedan is beloved by police for its durability and muscle, and also, above all, for its hulking yet stealthy silhouette. Anyone who has been pulled over in the past twenty years is self-trained in spotting an unmarked Crown Vic. Its distinctive profile was so synonymous with the police that flashing lights became secondary. The mere sight of its outline was enough to frighten civilian drivers into compliance.
Ford sold the first Crown Victoria in 1979, but it didn’t enter popular consciousness until a 1992 redesign introduced the rounded body shape. The car was built like a tank. Inside, it felt like a living room. It had a surplus of overhead space, and in some early models a six-foot officer could lie comfortably across the front seat. It rode so smoothly that some cops likened it to a Cadillac Eldorado. At the same time, it could jump a six-inch curb at sixty miles per hour. “You couldn’t kill it no matter what you did to it,” said Ford spokesman Octavio Navarro in 2011.
The Crown Victoria received its first groundswell of exposure in June of 1994, when ninety-five million Americans watched a fleet of nearly two dozen black-and-white cars trail O. J. Simpson through Los Angeles. It mattered not that the fuel efficiency of the Crown Vic was only marginally better than that of Al Cowling’s mammoth Ford Bronco. The chase heralded the Crown Vic’s omnipresence in the nineties. From then on, it played a singular role in news and entertainment. The vehicle became an emblem for all police activity, both real and imagined.
From “Adam-12” to “CHiPs” to “Cops,” television has sustained a longstanding love affair with the patrol car, but the proliferation of police procedurals in the nineties gave the Crown Vic unmatched visibility. In shows like “NYPD Blue” and “Law & Order,” themes of interpersonal conflict and stress overtook the previous generation’s penchant for wild chases. The unmarked Crown Vic became the ideal automobile for a new television archetype: the world-weary detective who conceals an explosive rage beneath a blank expression.
The Crown Vic had key roles in male-centric crime epics like Michael Mann’s “Heat” and Clint Eastwood’s “Mystic River,” but its proudest movie moment came in the 2007 coming-of-age comedy “Superbad.” In that film, two daffy on-duty officers adopt a luckless teen-ager for an evening of anarchic joyriding in their police cruiser. In a drunken celebration at the end of the night, they torch the car and invite the gawky adolescent to shoot it up with a police pistol as it burns—a fantasy come to life for every hapless teen who was shadowed by a Crown Vic.
During the mid-aughts, Crown Vics proliferated in the Deep South, but police officers weren’t driving them. Young rap fans in places like Killeen, Texas, and Huntsville, Alabama, couldn’t dream of buying the luxury autos they saw in rap videos on MTV. Instead, they had to settle for society’s most unattractive castoffs: Buicks and Chevys inherited from their grandparents, and Crown Victorias scored for cheap at police auctions. A car club called the Crown Vic Boys was founded in Atlanta in 2006, and has since spread to some thirty chapters across the country. Believers found new ways to make the dull cars scream. Crown Vics were retrofitted with popsicle-colored paint jobs and enormous tires, and were sometimes jacked up to the height of a city bus. In his 2010 song “Gumpshun,” the rapper Big K.R.I.T., from Meridian, Mississippi, boasted that he needed a ladder to exit his Crown Vic.
When the news arrived, in 2011, that Ford was producing its last run of Crown Victorias, police departments across the country stocked up on as many orders as they could afford. The last-minute sales boom was not enough to save the vehicle or its stablemates in the fleet, the Lincoln Town Car and the Mercury Grand Marquis, both of which fell victim to new fuel-economy regulations. Ford attempted to entice police buyers with a new streamlined Taurus model, but most departments have opted to invest in Dodge Chargers (for the muscle) or Chevy Tahoes (for the space). A redesigned, fuel-efficient Chevy Caprice police car has also gained traction after a fifteen-year absence, though some older cops joke that you can’t fit nearly as many bodies in its trunk.
As Crown Vics become scarcer, Hollywood will inevitably adopt the new standard-issue police car for movies and television shows. Custom-car fanatics short on cash will inevitably perform extraordinary experiments on whatever discarded autos flood the police auctions of the future. It was once unthinkable that a car as nondescript and institutional as the Crown Vic would become iconic, let alone a symbol of Southern hip-hop. In fifty years, a grizzled car enthusiast will dream of finding a mint 1998 Crown Vic, and he’ll have to explain to his befuddled grandson that he lived in a time when police officers, elderly citizens, and Southern rap disciples all wanted to drive the same car.
Photograph by Scott Olson/Getty.
