Car Pool

I am a member of the San Francisco Police Department, but as my ID boldly states across the top, a civilian employee.  I’m not a sworn officer.  Not even close.  I don’t wear a uniform, badge, or firearm and I most certainly do not travel in a black-and-white squad car.  I do travel around The City maintaining and configuring the SFPD computer systems and infrastructure, but in a far less interesting manner.  Occasionally we walk from my office to the closer buildings, but usually we drive.             

There is a pool of cars available to those who don’t belong in a black-and-white.  Most of these have been seized.  That means that an arrested and convicted felon not only lost his freedom, he also lost, in one case, his silver 2003 four-door Pontiac Grand Prix.  This is the car the engineer I’m shadowing over the next few weeks and I have been assigned a few times when we head out.  Grand Prix is French for grand prize, but the car we’ve been driving around in is hardly grand and certainly no prize.  If this is the return on their hard work that local drug dealers aspire to, then perhaps it’s not as rewarding a profession the countless movies and television shows have led me to believe.

The Grand Prix, the 2003 model we’re using anyway, is about an unremarkable car as can be found.  It has a 6 cylinder engine that gives it about as much pickup as a street sweeper heading uphill on California from Grant (it’s very steep there), a dashboard that sags to the right as if the glove compartment has been filled with lead or stuffed with a body that was filled with lead.  It has a long scratch along the right side that may have been caused by a close brush with an iceberg, no hubcaps, no rearview mirror, a battery-powered plastic light like the kind that you stick on the wall of your closet that has been “attached” to the headliner because the factory light stopped working and no one was interested in fixing it, and a dishwater gray paintjob that is so dull it’s guaranteed to send Bobby McFerrin into a spiral of depression from which only years of therapy will extract him.*  

That’s how we roll.

We head down to the basement, past the evidence locker that has so much pot in it that the entire floor smells like unwashed skunks, into the large parking garage where motorcycles with the SFPD logo are lined up like a Harley Davison showroom, to an office where we are assigned a car by parking space number so we don’t know what we’re getting until we go to the lot under Highway 80 and find it. This lot is surrounded by 15 foot high chain link topped by barbed wire and holds about 50 cars.  The Grand Prix sits in spot 21, under what I can only assume is a nest of incontinent pigeons. 

Driving around San Francisco in this car kind of makes you wish the felon from which it was seized was out of prison and upon finding the car of his dreams parked outside a nondescript office building, would steal it back.  No such luck.

Once we were assigned a Ford Crown Victoria, the stereotypical cop car. It was more platinum than gray and had no scratches or aftermarket non-automotive light fixtures, and sat under pigeons who were more “regular.”  Like the Grand Prix it had no hubcaps but somehow that made it look more… bad ass.  I don’t know if this car was seized or just never got the paint job for a patrol car.  We took this car to Hunters Point where the Police Crime Lab is housed.  Rolling across town and then meandering through ancient and abandoned buildings on the former Navy base with the windows down, I finally felt I worked for the police instead of a tier two drug dealer with low ambitions when it comes to his ride. 

I can’t help it but someday, I’d like to walk out to the parking lot and find the 21^st parking spot occupied by either Steve McQueen’s 1968 390 V8 Ford Mustang GT Fastback (325 horsepower) or Karl Malden’s brown 1970 Ford LTD (horsepower unknown but probably less than McQueen’s).  But I suppose there are cars even drug dealers can’t get anymore.

*Bobby McFerrin sang the song Don’t Worry, Be Happy.