"The best never die. They just retire. And sometimes, if they get bored, they find something else to do."
I am a special deputy sheriff in Indiana. I've been interested in police cars since long before I even considered working in the public safety field. Some of my earliest influences were a black-and-white Westerville, Ohio police department boxy 9C1 that I got to sit in during DARE class in elementary school back in 1990, and an unmarked blue '90 9C1 ISP car that was a friend's father's commission for seven years. I remember thinking how cool the similar-to-the-9C1 Impala SS was when it first came out, and came to love my grandparents' retail 1985 Pontiac Parisienne B-body (a car I now own) and its similarity to the Caprice 9C1 when I was younger. My first GM B-body was a rotted-out Canadian-market 1990 Caprice 9C1 with the L05 5.7-liter V8 that came from the Ontario Provincial Police fleet. I bought it on April 1, 2001 and have been hooked on 9C1s and B-bodies in general ever since. After learning the hard way that you just can't fix rust (unless you spend a whole lot of money that I didn't have), I graduated to a rust-free Texas DPS 1994 Caprice 9C1 with the LT1 in May, 2002 - a car that I still own today. I purchased my grandparents' retail 1985 Pontiac Parisienne in 2005 for a song. In 2006 I got back into the boxy 9C1 game with the purchase of my 1989 Caprice 9C1, originally from the City of Las Cruces, New Mexico, out in the desert southwest where rust barely exists. Over the next two years, I completely stripped the car, had the body worked over and painted by a decent shop, and spent hundreds of dollars on replacement parts to make the car as new as possible. It was not a complete frame-off restoration, but for the total investment, it came out pretty well.
I recently got into the wonderful world of Mopar police cars with the purchase of my current daily driver, a 2007 Dodge Charger AHBP with the 5.7-liter HEMI engine with 29,900 miles that came from the Pleasant Grove Police Department in Utah. Learning the Dodge is like learning a new language. The option codes and terminology are all new to me. I still proudly own all of my B-bodies, however, and have no plans to liquidate any time soon. I see what happens to B-bodies in the wrong hands, and I don't want that to happen to my cars. They aren't making any more of them.
"The best never die. They just retire. And sometimes, if they get bored, they find something else to do."
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