Why Police Crushed A Durango Hellcat Even Though They Wanted to Keep It

There are dozens of stories about how police departments seize cool cars and place them into the agency’s fleet, adorning them with a police livery, sirens, lights, and all of the other equipment cop cars use. It’s a fun PR stunt that wins points from the public, and usually results in cars plucked straight out of Need for Speed: Most Wanted.

When that doesn’t happen, the cars are either held for a set period of time before being relinquished back to the owner (usually with a fine). If the owner doesn’t want to pay the fines and the storage fees, it’s sold at auction. In the case of this Dodge Durango SRT Hellcat, noticed by our friends at The Drive, neither of those things happened. Instead, the super-SUV was crushed into a pancake to score points with the media and the public.

The Louisville Metro Police Department held a livestream on Facebook on Wednesday to show off the Durango’s demise, complete with a press conference involving the city’s police chief, Paul Humphrey, and the city’s mayor, Craig Greenburg.

The supercharged, V8-powered SUV was seized after the owner was caught allegedly street racing last year. Like most of these stunts, this one was angled as a deterrent to keep people from street racing. An anti-street-racing ordinance signed into law back in 2022 allows Louisville police to hold onto seized cars for up to six months, along with a $1,000 fine. From the livestream:

We want this to be symbolic to people who are out here doing the street racing, understanding that we will take your car.

[…]

So far, we’ve seized 52 cars do date for this year, and last year we seized 70 total, and 62 in 2023. We’ve seized the total of 167 cars under this [ordinance].

Humphrey says of the cars seized under this ordinance, the department has auctioned four so far. He also says he’d have loved to have the car in the fleet:

Once the car is released, the owner has 45 days to come and claim it. And so when they don’t, we ultimately take possession of those cars and they’re put up for auction, so that’s revenue returned back to the police department, to the city to do the work that we need to do. I would have loved to throw this car in the fleet if it were legal.

The reason this Hellcat wasn’t legal? Well, it was actually several Hellcats spliced together, according to the police. From Humphrey’s speech:

This car is pieced together from several different stolen cars. The engine, the frame, the body, they’re all from different cars, and so for that reason, this car is not street legal and cannot be put back out on the street.

While it’s tough to tell from the outside, a video published to YouTube of the department crushing the Hellcat shows the engine bay, which seems to be painted an entirely different color than the exterior body panels.

Still, I have some questions. Why not just resell the entire car to a dismantler? This way, any proceeds could’ve gone to the department, or even better, the rightful owners of those parts (or their insurance companies). Humphrey says it wasn’t worth the agency’s time:

We did consider how to sell some of those parts, but because of the nature of the way that car is assembled, that’s not going to be a fiscally responsible avenue.

I also think the Metro Police could’ve just finagled the Kentucky DMV to give them a plate for this Hellcat. While there are some very real safety concerns regarding cut-together cars like this, it’s still a running, driving vehicle. Surely the department could’ve found some use for it, right? Maybe as a low-speed towing machine? Or as some sort of training tool for new officers. Firefighters always need cars to practice on for stuff like car fires or extracting injured occupants.

I don’t know, crushing a perfectly useful SUV for any reason just doesn’t sit right with me. So much potential, wasted.

(Correction: A previous version of the story misspelled Paul Humphrey’s name.) 

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