Police equipment in the 1970's

My days as a DeKalb County Police Officer 1976-1981

The date was August 2, 1976 and at 4:00 in the afternoon I was standing in the roll call room and started my first shift as a rookie cop. I looked around. There were 50-60 officers lined up for inspection. As an aside, there were only 4-5 female officers. These days some departments have 40% female officers. Please see my website for more thoughts on female officers. http://www.protectingsharks.com/

Starting that evening I rode for 8 weeks with a Patrol Training Officer before I entered the 18 week DeKalb Police Academy. I wanted a job that would be different and even exciting at times. Well, like they say, I got the bonus plan. But those stories can be told another day. Mr. Lee Lofland asked me to write about the equipment that we carried in the 1970’s.

Take a close look at the car. It was heavy and fast. There is a blue spoiler on the hood - not for decoration but because the engines ran so hot! The Motorola radio signal bounced off repeater towers in the county and every time the signal hit the tower the radio made a beep-beep-beep sound. After awhile you completely tuned it out. A very few of the cars had a computer terminals. Now almost every car has a terminal and/or laptop computer to communicate with and to write your reports on.

The first two years we did not carry walkie-talkies. When you got away from your car, you were unable to communicate. Many, many nights everyone held their breath until an officer came back on the radio. Today the officers have walkie-talkies, cell phones and some carry recorders on their belts to record what happens on the street.

For the entire time with DeKalb I carried a 6 shot service revolver; a Colt .357 magnum Trooper with six additional cartridges in an ammo holder. Also, I carried a hand cuff case, a ring for my night stick and that was it. My pistol holster only had a small leather strap to secure the pistol. By today standards this was suicide. In 1980 one officer was killed, another shot and severely wounded when a perpetrator grabbed one of their guns and shot them both. That could have been me. I was on vacation that night and that was my patrol beat. Very quickly, I brought a black jack for my back pocket. I wore a back up pistol and carried as much ammo for my service revolver as I could get away with.

My brother-in-law is a Marshall for Fulton County and I looked at his duty belt last week. His service pistol is a Glock model 23 that holds 16 cartridges and he carries two extra magazines for a total of 46 shots! He also carries a Taser (a wonderful way to subdue someone without deadly force), a walkie-talkie, pouch for rubber gloves, handcuff case, an ASP baton, a small but very powerful flashlight and pepper spray. Oh yeah, he wears a bullet proof vest. We were strongly discouraged from wearing them as it would give us a Superman complex and we might act in a stupid or dangerous manner. (?)

DeKalb ran three ten hour shifts. The evening shift and Task Force (graveyard) shift overlapped for 4 hours.

Day Shift 7:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.

Evening 4:00 p.m. - 2:00 a.m.

Task Force 10:00 p.m. - 8:00 a.m.

After 2:00 a.m. there were usually 18-20 cars to cover 270 square miles. It is no exaggeration that some nights your nearest back up was 30-40 miles away. You handled the situation or it handled you.

Which brings me to what else we carried in the cars for officer protection. Every patrol car had an Ithaca 12 gauge shotgun in the trunk. I was given a small box of 5 buckshot rounds. I carried two boxes of shotgun shells next to the shotgun. In the days before civil liability was such an issue a lot of officers bought their own rifles. I saw AR 15’s, Ruger Mini 14’s, Eagle .45 (looks like a Thompson) and a few carried Winchester 30-30 deer rifles. A friend on mine carried an H & K assault rifle in .308. Almost everyone gave him a hard time until we had a barricade situation and he almost single handedly drove the bad guy out of the house with the furious barrage of bullets from his H & K assault rifle.

I was very proud to be DeKalb Police Officer. At the time we had the best equipment and undoubtedly the best training. The FBI reports the late 1970’s was perhaps the most dangerous times for law enforcement officers in American history. Drugs were becoming a major problem, the criminals did not fear the police like in earlier times and the criminals were beginning to carry automatic pistols. That meant sometimes you were grossly outgunned. Even after all the terrible things I witnessed and losing three fellow officers while I was there I am still glad I was a cop. I have close friends who are still there or recently retired. And whenever I see a patrol car with someone pulled over I slow down to make sure everything is OK. I am older, heavier and slower but I know I will out of my car and trying to assist that officer if they need help. It is either in your blood or it never will be.