Cop cars have a special allure all to themselves. They are part family sedan, part muscle car, have to be ready to be a demolition derby car and be able to take the kinds of abuse that design engineers get nauseous over, all day long, without breaking. There’s a reason that the Ford Crown Victoria P71/Police Interceptor lasted as long as it did…it was a tank! So are the other cars you automatically think of as excellent cop cars: 9C1 Caprices from the 1990s, Dodge Diplomat and Plymouth Gran Fury AHBs from the 1980s, and probably the most BangShift-approved cop car of all time, the Dodge Polara and Plymouth Fury squads of 1969, complete with a 440 that would scare even the most confident muscle car owner back in the day. But there are lots of other cars that tend to get overlooked that did well for cop duty. People remember B4C Camaros and Mustang SSPs, but when was the last time you gave a 1970s Chevrolet Nova 9C1 any thought? You remember the last of the big-block Mopars chasing the Duke Boys around the county, but unless I say “Adam 12”, did you even remember AMC cop cars?

The benefit to owning a cop car is that you ended up with the ideal “stripper”: all of the good performance stuff you needed, none of the gingerbread extras you didn’t. The cars were bought by city and state governments to be workhorses, not a family sedan, so crap like overstuffed seats and tons of sound deadening were to be found. That means there is (usually) less weight to deal with. That might not be such a big deal now with cars like the Ford Police Interceptor and the Dodge Charger Pursuit, but in the late 1970s, both manufacturers and motor pools around the country were trying anything to keep cop cars worth mentioning. Take, for example, this 1980 Dodge Aspen four door. Doesn’t look like much, does it? Minus the trademark Mopar “bullet hole” dog dish caps on the steel wheels, it wouldn’t be, except for one three-digit code: “A38”. Prior to 1984, A38 was the fender tag code for a police-order vehicle, and it was the way to turn the Aspen, which by this time was a disgraced midsize that stood for everything wrong with Chrysler in the 1970s, into something very interesting. The Aspen was already a handler compared to the Dodge Dart it replaced, but in addition to the beefed up suspension and added sway bars (items that were also found in the Super Coupe and the 1981-83 Imperial), it packs the 185 horsepower E58 360 and 727 Torqueflite for a powertrain. At $3500 for an Arizona car, you’d have a useable four-door sedan with a 360 that is perfectly ready for a power boost, a solid transmission to back it with, and looks that fly far under the radar.

Craigslist Link: 1980 Dodge Aspen A38