ABERDEEN, Ohio — “They’ll be on the road by next week,” Chief David Benjamin of the Aberdeen Police Department said of the department’s two new donated Ford Explorer cruisers.
Aberdeen received the cruisers from Franklin County Sheriff’s Department early last month, though this isn’t the first time they’ve been a help to Benjamin, he said.
“I’ve had a relationship in the past with the Franklin County Sheriff’s Department. They’re fleet services, whenever they pull a cruiser off the road, they donate them to other agencies. A lot of times they strip them down from the equipment, but you get a pretty nice well-maintained cruiser. This has probably been five or six years that I’ve had this communication line. When I was chief in Winchester we received two Crown Vics.”
Benjamin said that he had frequent communication with the Franklin County Sheriff. Every six months or so, he’d send them an email checking to see if they had cruisers to donate.
“About the first part of November we received some communication from them and they said ‘hey, we have three Ford Explorers that we’re looking to donate if that’s something you’d be interested in.’ And a lot of times when you get them they have small issues, so the first cruiser we got was a 2016 and it had 137,000 miles on it. The only thing wrong with it was a cracked wind shield, so that was a quick fix, no problem.”
“The other was a 2015, and they believed it had an exhaust manifold issue, but when we dug into that a little further, it was more of an issue. It also had a bad turbo, and a few other things, so it does cost us a little bit as far as maintenance to get it on the road, but for $1800 I think is the total cost on it getting fixed, it’ll be on the roadway as well.”
Benjamin said the department is excited to be able to get a 2015 and 2016 Ford Explorer with around 130,000 miles on them and to think that they’ll last four or five years in their service. This year alone, Benjamin said that their biggest problem has been vehicle maintenance.
“We have three cruisers that are well over 100,000 miles, so every time we turn around one of them has been in the shop, so we’ve not been able to keep cruisers on the road. To get four or five years out of a cruiser that’s been donated will be a blessing to our agency and help out our budget tremendously,” he said.
Benjamin also shared a little on their cruisers new and improved look.
“When we got them they were all black. We’re trying to keep everything uniform, so when somebody sees our cruisers, they’ll known it’s Aberdeen.”
Benjamin attributes this idea of uniformity and level of distinction to Maysville’s cruisers.
“You know when you see a silver cruiser in Maysville, you pretty much know that’s Maysville’s cruiser. Silver with blue decals, it pops out, so you don’t have to read that it says Maysville, you already know. So Aberdeen wants to be the same way, we want to be uniform. We want people to know that when they see that black cruiser and white cruiser with those blue decals on the side that they know it’s Aberdeen.”
“We tried to keep it simple,” he said, “but we also want to make sure it’s something distinctive, that doesn’t look like any other agency.”
The decals were done by Black Design in Ripley, Ohio.
