Arkansas State Police made a strategic decision that a number of law enforcement agencies have been slowly coming around to: if criminals are going to use high-performance Mopars to evade the standard fleet, equipping the fleet with competitive hardware is a reasonable tactical response. With Dodge Charger Scat Pack vehicles in the patrol fleet, Arkansas troopers have access to vehicles with genuine high-performance capability rather than standard police interceptors that simply can’t stay with a modified muscle car.
The test case came when a Chrysler 300 driver attempted to evade a pursuing trooper in a Scat Pack. Unlike the encounters involving Hellcats or heavily modified vehicles where the performance gap is simply too large to close, a Chrysler 300 — even a well-running one — doesn’t have the performance advantage over a Scat Pack that a Hellcat does. The outcome of the chase, based on the available footage, demonstrated the point that matching police hardware to the performance level of the vehicles they’re chasing changes the tactical calculus for would-be evaders.
The broader policy question of whether high-speed pursuits are appropriate — even when the police car is competitive — remains live. The risk to third parties during any high-speed pursuit is real and significant regardless of the respective vehicle performance levels. Arkansas’s approach of building a more capable fleet is a middle ground between the ‘abandon all pursuits for non-violent offenses’ policy that some departments have adopted and the ‘pursue regardless of risk’ approach that others still use.
The Scat Pack’s role in Arkansas police work has become its own ongoing story, punctuated by the infamous blackout Charger that kept evading the fleet. The specific cat-and-mouse dynamic in Arkansas is a localized version of a national pattern: police equipment catching up to the performance of criminal vehicles, slowly and unevenly, while the specific highest-performance builds remain difficult to catch in any circumstances.
For anyone keeping score, the Scat Pack in a pursuit situation is a significant deterrent for most vehicles on the road. For the genuine outliers — Hellcats, heavily modified muscle cars — the answer remains aerial support, spike strips, and investigation rather than pursuit. But for the more common scenario of someone in a regular performance car trying to run, the odds have gotten better for Arkansas troopers.