#MichiganStatePolice

Ford Motor Co. has announced that the Mustang Mach-E it sent off to tackle the Michigan State Police 2022 model year evaluation has passed, which is likely to bode well for the possibility of future fleet sales. But let’s not put the cart before the proverbial horse just yet. While Ford has had a long and fruitful history furnishing quality police vehicles, it has also offered up models that later required your author to do some research to figure out what “pursuit-rated” actually means.

The Mach-E passing the MSP’s gauntlet could simply mean that it didn’t endure a catastrophic failure while zipping around Grattan Raceway and we’re a little over a month away from getting comparative metrics for all vehicles tested earlier this month. However, Ford wanted to get out ahead of the test results so it can continue hyping the EV.

Whenever I close my eyes to fantasize about police vehicles, it’s a foregone conclusion that I’m thinking about a Ford Crown Victoria. The model had a two-decade lifespan occupying departmental motor pools as the de facto police cruiser. But it’s been out of action since 2012, leaving a gigantic hole in governmental order forms that allowed other brands to flood into the space. While Ford managed to keep law enforcement interested in its SUVs (and sometimes F-Series pickups), Dodge’s Charger secured the most sedan sales by far.

Ford probably doesn’t want to find itself missing out on the most lucrative corner of the fleet market moving forward, especially as governments begin to embrace electrification. We’ve already seen the manufacturer float a few hybrid options by departments to see what they think. But now it’s ready to see how an all-electric vehicle might play. For the 2022 Model Year Police Evaluations, Ford handed the Mach-E over to Michigan State Police — giving them carte blanche to subject it to multiple days of abuse in order to establish whether or not it’s worthy of active duty.

Michigan State Police, along with a baker’s dozen of truckers and a couple of suburban police departments, came up with a clever solution to avert a suicide early Tuesday morning. Some time around 1:00 a.m., police received a report of a man getting ready to jump off the overpass where I-696 runs under Coolidge Hwy, just a couple of miles north of Detroit. He had either climbed over or around the protective fence and was standing on the top of the bridge’s side barrier, above eastbound traffic, near the median.

There happens to be a Michigan State Police post just a half mile away, so response was both quick and massive. While negotiators from the MSP, Oak Park, and Huntington Woods PDs talked to the man, the state police began shutting down eastbound traffic on the interstate highway. Well, they didn’t shut down traffic entirely. While cars and light trucks were rerouted off the freeway, about a half dozen tractor-trailer rigs were let through to the overpass, where police directed them to line up closely, side-by-side, directly under the bridge. The idea was to shorten the fall if the man decided to go ahead and jump. The same was done on the westbound side of the overpass. A total of 14 truckers apparently volunteered to help save the man’s life, though only 13 fit under the bridge.

In Michigan, you can’t get a car with a salvage title on the road legally without first having it inspected by a state certified salvage vehicle inspector, typically a specially trained police officer. The officer inspects the car for safety and checks the Law Enforcement Information Network (LEIN) to make sure the VIN hasn’t been reported as stolen. The car’s owner pays a $100 cash fee to be forwarded to the state government, the inspector signs off on the forms, and the state issues a new, clean title.

That is unless Seth Swanson was your inspector, allegedly.

Former Michigan State Police trooper, Swanson, 31 of Royal Oak, has been charged by the state attorney general with felony counts of embezzlement and forgery for pocketing over $170,000 in fees in what appears, based on the large number of cars involved, to have been an organized title washing scheme.

In the made-for-TV movie Duel, a somewhat legendary film for car enthusiasts, Steven Spielberg and Richard Matheson tapped into drivers’ primal fear of being harassed by a malevolent trucker at the wheel of a semi much larger than their own vehicles.

Drivers in Indiana and Michigan experienced a non-fiction form of that fear last week, when a possibly drugged truck driver sideswiped cars as he drove erratically for almost 50 miles before police shot out one of the truck’s driving tires. The driver then punched a police dog and it took a number of officers to corral and restrain him even after he was tasered.

Around 8:30 p.m. last Thursday, May 26, Indiana State Police started receiving cellphone calls from drivers on eastbound Interstate 94 near Portage, Indiana. The drivers all reported a metal-hauling semi hitting construction barrels and sideswiping cars.

By the time Michigan State Police managed to stop him, the driver of the truck had traveled 48 miles from the time of the first reports. That highway is the main route between Chicago and Detroit and at that time of the evening, traffic is still pretty heavy as drivers sweep around the southern tip of Lake Michigan. It was fortunate that nobody was injured in the incident, according to Mlive.com.

Michigan State Police photoIn his capacity as the former head of the MSP’s Traffic Services Section it was Lt. Gary Megge’s job to eliminate speed traps set up by local municipalities. A few years ago Megge told the Detroit News, “I’ve spent eight years in traffic services, and I was a crash reconstructionist for five years before that, so I’ve seen my share of fatal wrecks, and I can tell you: Deaths are not caused by speeding. They’re caused by drinking, drugs and inattentiveness. The old adage that speed kills just isn’t realistic. The safest speed is the speed that is correct for that roadway at a given time. A lot of speed limits are set artificially low.”