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| Thursday, September 16, 2004 | (No comments posted.)
BELLEVILLE, Ill. (AP) -- 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 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.
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