The St. Joseph Police Department is deploying its new silver patrol cars into use over the next several weeks.

Commander Mike Wilson said one of the cars was out this past week already but had to be pulled back due to a computer issue.

“Our network administrator had to reinstall the software in that,” Wilson said. “We’ll hopefully have that out by the end of the week.”

He said the decision to change the color of the vehicles from black to silver was made by a committee.

“Some officers met and we had a committee,” Wilson said. “Some of it was visibility, we want to be more visible in our neighborhoods as we’re driving around.  There was some maintenance issues with the black vehicles in the summer in talking to our mechanics they felt we had some air conditioning equipment failures.”

The department purchased  six Chevy Impalas and one Ford Taurus.  Wilson said it’s the last year for the department to purchase the Impalas so they wanted to start working with the Taurus to see what all would be needed when they begin the transition to the new models.

“There’s a lot of equipment that goes into the cars and the setup is a lot different than what we’ve had with the Impalas so we didn’t know exactly what it was going to take and to see if it was going to incur any additional cost or time,” Wilson said.

The new vehicles arrived around the beginning of the year but setting up all of the equipment required for officers to hit the road has taken some time.

“We have the majority setup.  We’re waiting for some equipment,” Wilson said. “Probably in the next two to three weeks we should have them all out.”

The department budgets money every year for the purchase of new vehicles.  Wilson said some of the equipment is reused from the older cars with high mileage and maintenance issues.

“During the budget process we look at what our needs our,” Wilson said. “When we retire a car we reuse some of the equipment that we’ve bought.  Whether it’s a cage in the car….radios, other things like that.”