The Associated Press
BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) - A week after lawyers won the right to bring any Louisiana police department which owns a Crown Victoria police car into a lawsuit claiming the model is unacceptably dangerous, State Police are considering whether to drop the suit.
The Louisiana State Police fleet needs to replace 400 aging Crown Victoria Police Interceptors, and Ford Motor Co. won’t sell to agencies that are suing it.
While the class-action status won last week greatly increases the scope of the case it could also block just about every law enforcement agency and municipality in Louisiana from buying the cars.
Ford is trying to decide how to apply its no-sale rule in the expanded case, attorney Mike Pulaski said. It may mean that Ford will stop selling the cars to any agency that doesn’t opt out.
The lawsuit is among class actions in about a dozen states claiming that the model is prone to fatal fires in rear-end collisions, citing the deaths of 15 officers nationwide. Ford contends the deaths reflect officers’ risky work rather than a design flaw, and has won the only case to go to trial so far.
In spite of the lawsuits, about 80 percent of the specially packaged police cars sold nationwide are Crown Victoria Interceptors. Chevrolet had the only major competitors: the Impala, still available, and the Caprice, which General Motors stopped making as a police model in 1996.
Somewhere between 250,000 and 450,000 Interceptors are on the nation’s roads. Lawyers in the Louisiana case say there probably are 10,000 to 15,000 Interceptors in the state.
At one point, 38 Louisiana police departments and sheriff’s offices were suing Ford. Most, including the Orleans and Jefferson parish sheriff’s offices, dropped the suits. Those agencies may be excluded from the state’s class-action lawsuit, but the judge hasn’t ruled.
The lawsuits charge that Ford should pay because the cars are not as safe as the buyers thought they were.
“We feel we paid too much money when we bought the car because we didn’t know about the defect,” said Ben Beychok, one of the attorneys who filed the suit. “The defect was never disclosed, even though Ford knew about it years ago.”
Ford says the car has no defect. It has offered plastic shields for the gas tank.
Former state Attorney General Richard Ieyoub filed Louisiana’s lawsuit last year for State Police. It has continued under Charles Foti, who is in the odd position of supporting a suit as attorney general that he dropped as Orleans Parish criminal sheriff.
The state is not paying anything but is allowing Beychok, Tony Clayton and Alan Usry to lead the case on behalf of the state. Trial lawyers typically get nothing if they lose but one-quarter to one-third of any awards or settlements they win.
They asked to bring the state’s case and local lawsuits against Ford under one umbrella. State District Judge Wilson Fields in Baton Rouge ruled Monday that the state is entitled to represent, as a class, all political subdivisions that have bought Interceptors since 1992.
Pulaski said Ford will appeal, a process that could take up to a year.
Col. Henry Whitehorn, who oversees State Police, is consulting with department attorneys and has not decided whether to stay in the suit, Lt. Lawrence McLeary said.