I’ve Rarely Seen A Pontiac Police Car And After Learning More About Them I’m Glad That I Didn’t

If I ask you to picture an American police car of the twentieth century, you’ll probably imagine a big Ford Crown Victoria. Maybe you’ll envision one of those Dodge Monacos with a 440 as you’d see in an episode of CHiPs or T.J. Hooker, or possibly a Caprice from any movie filmed in late eighties LA. A scant few of you might picture an AMC Matador from Adam-12 if you’re a real anorak.

My guess is that not many Autopians would visualize a Pontiac police car. I always assumed that they didn’t really exist outside of Smokey and the Bandit movies, where they simply stuck lights and stickers on Pontiac LeMans sedans that came along with the Trans Ams as part of the movie deal. In fact, for a time, the Excitement Division made a concerted effort to fill police motor pools and keep a lid on your driving excitement. Some of them were formidable enough that you’d best pull over before trying any funny stuff, so grab a Dr. Pepper and a Diablo Sandwich and read on.

You Can Barely Fit A Dozen Donuts In That Thing

Let’s face it: silly as some of the fuzz’s selections might seem, essentially any car can be a police vehicle if the jurisdiction chooses it. One odd case ski towns of Aspen and Vail, locales so costly that the doctors and lawyers needed by the community often live in subsidized housing. For decades, the choice of police cars in these snowy locales were expensive European Saabs, selected for their ability to make it through the powder.

Or, how about a Renault 5/ Le Car serving as the tiny wheels beneath the long arm of the law? I really don’t care how you slice it, but using a Le Car as a law enforcement vehicle seems like a terrible idea in so many ways. Regardless, the city of LaConner, Washington was apparently so strapped for cash in the malaise doldrums that they chose these underpowered, tiny cars as their “cruisers.”

Pontiacs of almost any kind seem better suited to cop duty than the examples above, but they’ve always been a rare sight. Surprisingly, the idea of Pontiac police machines goes back at least to when the Kansas Highway purchased a fleet in 1939. It wasn’t until the 1950s, however, that the brand began officially offering specialized heavy-duty packages for use by police departments. With beefier springs, larger-diameter brake drums, and higher-output alternators for lights and sirens, these provided an alternative to the typical Chevy/Ford/Dodge choices of the day.

You know that line from The Untouchables about them bringing a knife and you bringing a gun, or something like that? This would be the case for Pontiac as the century wore on.

It’s Got Cop Shocks, Cop Brakes …

Things started to get serious in the early sixties when Pontiac began to make its shift into the performance arena, and when you make fast cars for the public, you’d better offer something for the lawmen to keep them in line, don’t you think? Pontiac released the “Enforcer” package to agencies in a push to get serious about patrolling the streets that the brand had inadvertently turned into a playground for its civilian muscle machines. The first 1961 full-sized Enforcer models featured 389 V8s in various states of tune, delivering up to 303 horsepower. I love the Mad Men era art below, with perp nicely dressed up in raincoat and hat; I wonder what these dudes would say about people getting on airplanes today in zebra-stripe sweats, Crocs, and oversized neck pillows.

The marketing material is priceless, with simulated testimony of scofflaws unsuccessfully tried to take on the vaunted “Enforcer”:

As Pontiac and other American car makers pumped up the output of their street cars, the “Enforcer” package began to include some heavier artillery.  For 1963, you could get a 421 cubic inch V8 with Pontiac’s “Tri Power” system of three two-barrel carbs producing 375 horsepower.

Pontiac offered smaller police vehicles as well, including this likely-more-maneuverable 1965 Tempest. Note that the top motor for the mid-sized cop car was still a 326 cubic inch V8, despite the fact that Mr. John Delorean had successfully stuffed a 389 into a Tempest coupe the year before.

The “Tri Power” setup was soon replaced with a much simpler four-barrel carburetor that was probably the size of a Panera bread bowl. Bored out to 428 cubic inches, the big Pontiac 8 still produced the same fabled 375 horses as before in this 1967 example below:

Forget “Wide Track”: look at how skinny those tires are! I bet they aren’t even radials. No wonder the cops inside are wearing helmets.

Pontiac fought hard after the dawn of emission controls in the late sixties to maintain as much power output as possible to stop those who were breaking the law (breaking the law, breaking the law) The new-for-1971 Pontiac Catalina could be had with one of three police packages: the “Light Duty,” the “Highway Enforcer,” and the top of the heap “Freeway Enforcer” (I thought “highway” and “freeway” were the same thing?) with a 455 cubic inch V8 making a solid 325 horsepower and a stump-pulling 500 foot pounds of torque. Here’s an example that was discovered after years in hiding:

There’s a reason you likely haven’t seen one of these. Sales of the Light Duty package were only 128 cars, and the Highway Enforcer only sold 130 copies. The “Freeway Enforcer”? A mere 28 examples made their way to the freeways, making one wonder why Pontiac even bothered.

Such low sales really make you wonder why Pontiac not only persisted in producing Enforcers but made a pretty solid push to market them, including one of the most well-known media appearances of cop cars ever.

I’m Gonna Barbeque Your…

Let’s be honest: the greatest unsung hero of the iconic and now-very-politically-incorrect Smokey and the Bandit wasn’t Sally Field, the awesome Jerry Reid, or even his dog Fred: it was the plethora of 1977 Pontiac LeMans cop cars throughout the film.

Was this an early example of product placement? It might very well have been.

This thing features in essentially half of the movie, particularly the Brentwood Brown one that Jackie Gleason’s character drives, which gets turned into a convertible without a driver’s door by the end.

Based on the marketing material I found, Pontiac continued its efforts to get more of municipal budgets through the mid-seventies. One of the hidden hot rods was their police editions of the compact “X” bodies, in this case, Pontiac’s version of Chevy Nova called the Ventura:

Oddly enough, the “full sized” Catalina for 1977 had been downsized to the point where it was essentially the same size and weight as the Colonnade LeMans.

However, the bread-and-butter of the Police lineup was the Enforcer based on the mid-sized Colonnade LeMans.

It’s the LeMans that we know of because of its appearance in the silly Burt Reynolds flick. According to almost all the sources that I’ve read, these cars were indeed all actual Enforcer models with the 200-horsepower 400 V8 (yup, that’s all you got in 1977) to assist in doing stunts and keep up with the Trans Am that (surprise) had the same motor under the screaming chicken. The ones in the flick certainly take some major abuse and keep going.

At the time, we didn’t know that this would be the last appearance of an official mid-sized Pontiac cruiser ever. With the end of the Colonnade line, the LeMans police car became a thing of the past.

Little did we know that any Pontiac cop car would soon be but a memory.

Pontiac Hangs Em’ Up

As much as General Motors never seemed to mind the internal competition between their brands, by the end of the Disco Decade, they appeared to have grown tired of their nameplates fighting for sales in the law enforcement market. The 1978 model year was the last that Pontiac would offer official police vehicles.

The downsized Catalina was unchanged from the year before. With the available 400 cubic inch four-barrel V8 and a lighter weight than the old Catalina or even possibly the Colonnade, it must have been a sleeper that didn’t drive that badly at all.

The “light duty” Ventura had become the facelifted Phoenix, and with the four-barrel 350, it must have been amusing to drive for a malaise era car at least.

After this, GM decided to make Chevrolet the sole provider of cop cars to take on Mopar and Ford. This certainly seems like it was a smart business decision, but a sad one when you consider the fearsome examples that came before.

It goes without saying that the Pontiac police cars you see on the screen after 1978 are indeed fakes, including the ones in the lamentable Smokey and the Bandit II, which were 1980 LeMans sedans reportedly destined for rental car duty but accidentally ordered without air conditioning for Arizona. As essentially useless sheet metal, they proved to be excellent car crash fodder.

There is one other well-documented case of Pontiacs being used for police duty. In Catoosa County, Georgia, Sheriff J.D. Stewart purchased 12 Trans Ams between 1978 and 1981, which were white with red interiors and featured 4-speed manual transmissions and omitted the A/C. Modified with radios, sirens, and blue dash lights, a surviving example is being restored now, and you can read the story about it here.

That’s a fitting final note to the Pontiac police story. Not every make and model of car seems worthy of this duty, but with wild tri-power Pontiacs and Ram Air GTOs roaming the streets, it only seemed fair that “the law” had the scales balanced in their favor. On second thought, maybe we lead-footed drivers should be happy that there weren’t a lot more of them before Pontiac went away for good. I’ve seen examples of Holden-based Pontiac G8 police cars that never came to be: talk about dodging a bullet.

Pontiac Points: 66 / 100 (1977 LeMans Enforcer)

Verdict: Not a great police car (or car in general), but as much power as the same-year Trans Am. Put the evidence in the car, boy!

Top graphic image: General Motors