Imagine driving home through Memphis in 1973. You are going a bit too fast. A flashing blue light appears in your mirror, so you pull over, wind down your window, and start apologizing. Then you look up. Standing beside your car, holding a badge, is Elvis Presley.
He tells you that you were speeding, warns you to slow down, signs an autograph, gets back in his car, and drives off into the night. This happened. Repeatedly. And the badge was real.
That last part is the bit most people get wrong. Elvis was not simply playing dress-up. On October 10, 1970, Sheriff Roy Nixon made him an honorary deputy sheriff of Shelby County. On February 10, 1972, he was appointed Chief Deputy Sheriff and handed badge number 6 — which Elvis promptly had encrusted with diamonds and rubies, because of course he did.
He carried that badge from 1972 until 1976. He also held an honorary Memphis Police captain’s badge, and a genuine federal narcotics badge personally handed to him by President Nixon in 1970.
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What he lacked was any actual arrest powers. Honorary badges are ceremonial. They do not let you stop a member of the public. Elvis stopped members of the public anyway.
To do it properly, he kitted himself out. He bought a portable revolving blue light for the roof of his Lincoln Mark IV, plus a police radio, a long flashlight and a billy club. For his 36th birthday he treated himself, according to one account, to a pile of police equipment. Then he went out on patrol around the streets of Memphis, mostly at night, because he could rarely sleep.
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Priscilla Presley described the routine in her own book, and her version is the definitive one. “He had a million badges and a blue police light on his car,” she wrote. “He liked nothing more than putting that light on his car and pulling people over. He’d walk up to the window, show off his official badge and say, ‘Son, you were speeding. Just want to warn you to slow down.’” Then came the best part. “The driver would see him and remain speechless.”
He never wrote a ticket, because he could not. What he handed over instead was a lecture about safe driving and an autograph.
The strange thing is how sincere it all was. Priscilla explained that he genuinely saw himself as a lawman and a protector of the public, and he backed it up. He kept a police scanner running, and when something came over it, he would sometimes get on his motorcycle and reach the scene before the actual police did. One night in 1976 he came upon a traffic accident, got out and started directing traffic alongside the officers. That went perfectly well for a while, right up until drivers began noticing that the man waving them through the junction was Elvis Presley. Another time, spotting two men fighting at a petrol station, he drove over and stopped it. His presence alone tended to end an argument.
And it was not all theatre. He donated money and equipment to the Memphis Police, funded their softball team, visited working patrolmen on holidays, gave cars to officers he was close to, and paid the funeral expenses of a fallen officer. The blue light later sold at a Graceland auction for $2,000. One of his badges went for $8,750. Somewhere out there are people in their seventies who still tell their grandchildren about the night they got pulled over by the King of Rock and Roll.