By Susan Skiles Luke, The Associated Press
BELLEVILLE, Ill. -- Ford Motor Co. continued to sell Crown Victoria police cars even after the deaths of several officers in fiery rear-end crashes showed the vehicles were unsafe, a lawyer for Illinois police departments told a jury Wednesday in the first class-action lawsuit to come to trial over the widely used cruisers’ safety.
“That policy of minimizing safety to maximize profits is at the heart of why we’re here today,” said attorney David Perry, who also showed jurors photos of the officers who had died.
Ford’s lawyers countered that the Crown Victoria Police Interceptor is safe and that the cruiser is involved in police crashes because officers are more likely than other motorists to travel at high speeds and park at the sides of highways.
“I don’t mean to minimize or trivialize police fatalities,” Ford lawyer James Feeney of Detroit told the jury during Ford’s opening statement. “But the question here is whether this car is reasonably safe for police work, and it is.”
The trial that opened Wednesday in St. Clair County Circuit Court, 15 miles east of St. Louis, is the first among class-action lawsuits pending in 11 states over the Crown Victoria Police Interceptor, a specially built police cruiser that accounts for the majority of police cars on U.S. streets.
Fourteen officers since 1983 have died in fiery crashes after their Crown Victorias were rear-ended.
None of those crashes occurred in Illinois, but the St. Clair County Sheriff’s Office and nearby Centreville Police Departments sued anyway, accusing Ford of fraud and deceptive trade practices in a bid to force the company to retrofit their Crown Victorias with special safety equipment.
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of every law-enforcement agency in the state and seeks to have Ford pay to install the safest equipment available to protect the cruisers.
“We can’t afford to do it ourselves,” said St. Clair County Sheriff Mearl Justus, who attended the morning court session. The lawsuit accuses Ford of telling the public the car was safe when it knew it was not.
Ford lawyers have declined to estimate how much losing the case could cost the company, which is facing a tough international auto marketplace and still recovering from costly litigation involving rollovers by its Explorer SUV.
The lawsuit does not specify a dollar amount, but Perry told jurors that outfitting the 14,000 Crown Victoria squad cars in use in Illinois with trunk and fuel-tank liners would cost $62 million.
A 2002 government investigation in the Crown Victoria found no specific defect to blame for the fiery crashes, though Ford still offered to retrofit police cruisers with special shields around the gas tanks. It also sold $150 trunk liners aimed at keeping sharp equipment from piercing the gas tank in the event of a rear-end collision, said Douglass Lampe, a Ford attorney supervising the litigation.
Those additions were not meant as an admission of any defect, Lampe said.
“We were making a safe car safer,” he said. “We can’t not do that even though people are going to say an improvement of tomorrow’s vehicles indicts yesterday’s,” he said before Wednesday’s court session.
In court, the plaintiffs’ attorneys showed the jury photographs of officers who they said had been killed or injured in Crown Victoria crashes since the car was introduced in 1978.
“You will hear the company say these crashes are rare,” Perry, of Corpus Christi, Texas, told the jury of seven men and five women.
“These officers were rare, too,” he said. “Ford could and should have made these cars safer a long time ago.”
The trial is expected to last five weeks.