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 provided as a matter of course to barred even for the drive there. 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 108 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.

44 of the 216 policies say nothing about vehicles at all. Those rows are here and marked as silent rather than left out. A document that does not mention the patrol car has not banned it — and if the 108 agencies that print a price were shown alone, they would look like the rule instead of the exception.

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.

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.

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.