Houston police ‘car guy’ fixing up vintage cruisers

Houston Police Officer Jason Knox poses with his restored 1996 Chevrolet Caprice HPD cruiser and will drive it in the Thanksgiving Day parade Thursday. Houston Police Officer Jason Knox poses with his restored 1996 Chevrolet Caprice HPD cruiser and will drive it in the Thanksgiving Day parade Thursday. Photo: Steve Gonzales, Houston Chronicle / Staff Photographer Photo: Steve Gonzales, Houston Chronicle / Staff Photographer Image 1 of / 11 Caption Close Houston police ‘car guy’ fixing up vintage cruisers 1 / 11 Back to Gallery

Officer Jason Knox may be the one behind the wheel, but his Oilers-blue cruiser is the real celebrity.

Selfies, thumbs up and lookie-loos greet the handy Houston police car aficionado everywhere he goes in the law enforcement version of the 1996 Chevrolet Caprice he patched up to patrol the streets of Space City just like they used to.

Some, he says, remember the car from the inside.

“Nostalgia kicks in,” said Knox, a member of Houston Police Department’s Public Affairs Division.

The 22-year-old car is decked out with the Columbia blue that blanketed the HPD fleet in the mid-1990s. For Knox, it’s the first restoration project he has completed since he decided as a patrol officer in 2015 to return retired cop cars to their former glory. A visit to the Los Angeles Police Department museum inspired him, specifically their collection of vintage law enforcement vehicles — one for each decade, Knox said.

He searched high and low for a 1996 model Caprice that served the nation’s fourth largest city and had a chance at being roadworthy again, but that was a bust.

“By the time they make it to auction, they’re pretty dead,” Knox said.

Knox cast a wider net outside of Texas. He found a government surplus auction in Pasadena, California, that was offering the same model he was looking for.The Caprice he was eyeing once belonged to the Pasadena Police Department, where it logged a whopping 196,000 miles on it. He snagged the car on the cheap — a cool $700 — with little to no competition.

The good news? The car was ship-shape to boot. All he had to do was ship it back to Houston and change the oil, air filters and transmission fluid.

He said Chief Art Acevedo blessed the project but was the city was unable to earmark any funds to the restoration, which wrapped up in April. The Houston Police Officers Union pitched in a grand that covered the single-tone paint job. Another $350 of his own cash was required to order up the same decal shields that graced Houston police vehicles of that era, according to the union’s website.

“I thought it would need a new engine, but it started right up with an ice cold AC,” Knox said. “I’m not fixing to take the whole engine out and replace that. That’s beyond my skill set.”

He attributes the good condition of the vehicle to the official who drove it last, likely an administrative member of Pasadena’s force or a detective.

The Caprice was once considered the gold standard of rear-wheel-drive cop cars because of their heavy-duty brakes, suspension and engines. But when General Motors stopped manufacturing the vehicles at their Arlington plant in 1996, the more expensive Ford Crown Victoria took over the law enforcement market and became the new favorite. It was discontinued in 2011.

To prepare for his project, Knox read up and memorized how General Motors tweaked the body of their Caprices from year to year. The car he fixed up is a near match — inside and out — to the final 300 or so Caprices bought for Houston patrols after 1995, and similar to the earlier models that ferried Knox to school. His father, Councilman Mike Knox, served as a Houston police officer for 15 years until retiring in 1995.

Tracking down the same bits and pieces that made the same car that roamed Houston streets proved to be a pain.

In his spare time, he surveyed junkyards for parts. He popped open the hood of a chopped-up police Caprice near Hobby Airport and found the unique paint code that matched the Oilers football uniforms. He stumbled upon a working computer console from that year on eBay. It isn’t patched into the Houston police servers but back in the day, the clunky four to five-inch monitor would have shown a log of calls and vehicle information during traffic stops. As for the emergency light bar, Knox found on Craigslist, he said.

Don’t expect to see Knox in your rear-view mirror during a traffic stop. The car is strictly for community events and parades, he said. He plans to show it off during the Thanksgiving parade Thursday in downtown Houston.

Knox’s next project is to recreate the ‘88 Caprice police package to show what Houston authorities used to drive. He tracked down a barely-used Caprice from that year that was last registered to the campus police at the Texas State University in San Marcos. It had only 75,000 miles on it, which Knox said is “very low mileage for its age.”

The condition was just as good, Knox said, besides a touch of rust that required him to sandblast the wheels. After a fresh coat of paint, he expects to hit the road with it in January.

For his first car, he knew it didn’t need to be perfect. It needed to fire up and look like it came “straight off the streets.”

“I wanted it to have the dings and bumps,” he said, pointing to the cracked dashboard.

The bumps were not hard to miss during a drive from Midtown to the Montrose neighborhood, where bystanders stopped to gawk and snap photos of the ride as Knox sipped a coffee nearby.

Of the attention, Knox said “the car paid for itself.”

nicole.hensley@chron.com

@nkhensley