Neighborly gesture from Rindge allows Hancock to replenish police fleet

Jan. 31--HANCOCK -- When a station wagon veered into a Hancock police cruiser last November, it took one of the department's three vehicles out of commission.

Meanwhile, a few towns over, the Rindge Police Department was wondering what to do with an old Ford Crown Victoria it was retiring.

So when Rindge Police Chief Daniel Anair heard Hancock needed a cruiser, he said, it was "basically a no-brainer."

The two towns worked out a deal: Hancock rented the 2011 Crown Vic for 10 days at $100 per day, paid for with an insurance policy, then bought the car for $1.

Hancock police have had the not-so-new cruiser since November, according to Police Chief Andrew Wood. Wood recently announced the acquisition in a Facebook post that garnered multiple comments celebrating Yankee frugality and old-school neighborly help.

J&J Auto Body in Troy repainted the cruiser black, charging only the $301 cost of the paint and donating the labor, Wood wrote in the post.

The collision occurred Nov. 3 on Stoddard Road in Hancock. The police department said at the time that Officer Cameron Prior was driving near Hunts Pond Road when a Volvo station wagon coming from the other direction swerved to avoid a tree limb. The driver, Rebecca Dinerstein of Greenfield, lost control of the vehicle, and it hit the cruiser head-on, according to Hancock police.

Prior, Dinerstein and a passenger in her vehicle were taken to hospitals with non-life-threatening injuries.

Prior suffered a serious foot fracture and is still on medical leave, Wood said Wednesday.

The 2013 Ford Explorer driven by Prior was Hancock's newest SUV, according to Wood's Facebook post. While Wood said he expects to receive about $11,000 in insurance money for the totaled vehicle, that's far from the $40,000 a new cruiser would cost.

"We didn't have a lot of options," he said, aside from asking the town for another cruiser at town meeting in March. Wood already hopes to get voter approval for one vehicle purchase, to replace the department's oldest cruiser, which he said has about 200,000 miles.

Wood reached out to other chiefs in the state about the town's predicament, which is how word reached Anair in Rindge.

The Crown Victoria wasn't much use to Rindge, Anair said. Having replaced it with a new Ford F150, the department sometimes deployed the older car on roadside details or parked it near businesses that requested a police presence.

Trading in the vehicle would have been impractical, Anair said -- removing the equipment and stripping the police markings would have cost more than the trade-in value.

"The car was just sitting here, and we were wracking our brains -- do we just give it to the fire department to cut it up for training?" Anair said.

So Hancock taking the car off his department's hands, Anair said, was "a win-win for everybody."

It's not an ideal situation, Wood said. The 2011 sedan has about 80,000 miles on it, and the newer SUV it replaces was better able to travel the town's many dirt roads and steep hills. But it works in a pinch and should serve the department for a year or two.

"We're going to be going from a four-wheel drive to a two-wheel drive, but we'll make do," Wood said. "That's what we have to (do), here in New England."

Paul Cuno-Booth can be reached at 352-1234, extension 1409, or [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @PCunoBoothKS

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