Repairs put police cars out of service

Due to maintenance problems, only two of University Police's fleet of at least seven cars were operational last night, University Police Commissioner John Kuprevich said. And since two cars respond to every emergency, there would be no marked cars left to respond to other priority calls in the event of another emergency. As of 10:45 p.m., four patrol cars and an unmarked vehicle sat in the lot behind the University Police station. That means no cars were on the streets at that moment. Regardless of how many cars were on the streets, Kuprevich said, many are in poor shape and are getting old. "We're probably running them close to 80 or 90 thousand [miles]," he said. Kuprevich said he has ordered three new police-conditioned Chevrolet Caprices to replace the fleet's three most troubled cars. "We were at a point with the cars because of damage that we needed to get some new vehicles," Kuprevich said. He said he chose the three Caprices because "they were the only police cars we could get right away."