Can you take the patrol car?

What this shows

Three separate questions sit inside “can I take the car”, and agencies answer them independently of one another. Whether the car may go at all runs from yes through only for the drive there to barred outright. Who the fee falls on is a different question again — usually the employer, but at 4 agencies it comes out of the officer. And what it costs is published by 110 of the 216 — and 99 of those are New Jersey towns, which publish because state law leaves them no choice.

What “who pays” means here, because it is narrower than it sounds. It is who is charged for the department's vehicle under that agency's own rules. Almost always that is the employer hiring the officer, because these documents exist to set what a customer is billed. It is not what the work costs you: an officer driving their own car carries the fuel, the wear and the insurance whatever this column says, and only three agencies here address a private vehicle at all.

The 4 that charge the officer charge differently, which is the clearest sign that there is no standard here at all. Florida Highway Patrol takes 44.5 cents a mile and nothing else — the rate Florida's travel statute has set since 2006. Washington State Patrol takes its own state mileage rate plus $5 an hour, and starts the clock at the trooper's front door. Saint Paul ignores distance and time entirely and takes a flat $20 out of payroll, whatever the length of the job.

23 of the policies read here say nothing about vehicles at all. Those rows are marked as silent rather than left out. A document that does not mention the patrol car has not banned it — and if the 110 agencies that print a price were shown alone, they would look like the rule instead of the exception.

A further 1 have not been checked yet, and they are marked separately. That is a gap in our reading and not a finding about those agencies. It matters which is which: an agency whose own documents are silent and an agency nobody has opened yet look identical on a table that lumps them together, and only one of them is a fact about American policing.

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Every agency, A to Z

Each name links to that agency's full page, where the vehicle rules sit with the source document they came from and the date it was read.

Turning your row into a setting

The three questions this table answers are the three the app asks once and then stops asking. Under Off-Duty Profile it takes the vehicle you are authorized to use, how the car is paid for — per mile, per hour, per event or not at all — and whether your agency owes a minimum number of payable hours whatever the job runs to.

Those are not invented categories. They are what this table found: Florida Highway Patrol charges the trooper 44.5 cents a mile and nothing else. Washington State Patrol charges the state mileage rate plus $5 an hour, running from the trooper's front door. Saint Paul ignores distance and time and takes a flat $20 a job out of payroll. Three agencies, three different bases — which is why the setting has four options and not one.

Set it from your own row above and every detail you log afterwards carries the right vehicle cost without being asked again.

Your own car is a separate question

Only three of these agencies address the officer's private vehicle at all, and each one says a version of the same thing: the protections that come with the department's car do not travel to yours.

Which means that for the other 214 agencies on this page, nobody is recording the miles you put on your own car. Not the requesting employer, not your agency, not the policy. The fuel, the wear and the insurance are already yours; the record of them does not exist unless you keep it.

Those miles run in two directions and it is worth keeping them apart. Some are reimbursable — money you are owed now, on a claim, whoever is paying. Some matter at the end of the year instead. Which of the two depends on who hired you and how you were paid, and that is set out on 1099s and off-duty jobs rather than guessed at here. Either way the same thing has to happen first: somebody has to write the miles down on the day.

What this page cannot tell you

It reports what each policy says on the date that agency's page was read, and the rates move — Miami-Dade's were reset by a change in state retirement contribution rates. Where a fee is described but no figure is published, that is the document being silent, not a rate of zero. Your own agency's current documents govern.

Two different things called mileage

Worth keeping apart, because the policies do. Mileage is what you drive in your own car and track for tax. Mileage reimbursement is what some agencies charge you for driving theirs — Washington State Patrol bills the state rate plus $5 an hour, Saint Paul takes $20 a job out of payroll. Neither applies to every officer, and an agency can charge one without the other.