Bulletproof vests. I guess nowadays they call them 'ballistic' vests, or 'body armor', or 'personal protective gear.'
Back in my day, us coppers had quite a variety of terms for them, nearly all unprintable on this forum. I try to keep it rated 'PG' here. Parental Guidance...where has that gone? Might be a good topic for a future post.
Those vests sure were hell on hot days, let me tell you.
When I first started wearing one, back in 1979, bulletproof vests for coppers were rather crude, to put it mildly. Made of a material called Kevlar and fitted into a cloth carrier, you put it on over your head; they had a front panel and a back panel, with a strap down across each clavicle and four 2-inch straps from the back panel to the front, held in place by velcro. That way they were adjustable, so as to make them conform to your torso. Then you put your uniform shirt on over top of it, went out and put your life on the line.
There were a couple of problems: if you tightened the side straps too tight and weren't svelte they'd cut into your sides, showing the general public your fat rolls in the process in addition to chafing your skin. The other was, by virtue of moving around, the panels would ride up on you, until the front panel felt more like a clerical collar jammed into your Adam's apple.
So the manufacturers tried to solve the issue by adding an 'apron'-like extension to the front of the panel carrier that you tucked into your uniform pants, like a second set of shirt tails.
I can't tell you how many times I'd watch one of my co-workers unzip their pants, reach way inside and grab that apron so they could pull the vest back down where it was supposed to be. I did the same thing, too. We'd always take care to make sure we weren't in the public eye when we did that....didn't want anyone to get the wrong idea about what we were actually doing.
When we'd order our vests, usually every three years because of fabric decomposition, they came in a variety of threat levels; the higher the TL, the more protection they offered. That's protection, by the way, from handgun bullets. Our vests at that time, well...a rifle round or an ice pick would go right through them.
As time progressed, through the 80s and into the 1990s, manufacturers added side torso panels to the vests and these rectangular metal or ceramic plates that slid into the outside of the front of the vest carrier, designed to add further shielding for your sternum. Police officers, after getting shot with their vests on, were suffering from blunt force trauma; the impact of the bullet, with all that kinetic force behind it, still caused considerable damage to internal organs, though no penetration of the bullet occurred. The plates were added protection for blunt trauma.
Still, those vests saved countless thousands of police lives over the decades.
But they were, and probably still are, unbearably hot. That was one of the many reasons I preferred working night shift during my career; it was always somewhat cooler at night. Back in my early days at Mansfield PD, though, I was stuck on afternoon shift for six years. That's six years of July and August, with many sweltering days from late June and early September mixed in for good measure.
Those vests were absolutely, stiflingly torturous on smoking-hot and humid days. The A/C in the cruiser would always be cranked wide open as we'd pull the vests away from our chests, as much as we could, to allow that luxuriant, cool air access to sweat-soaked T-shirts and bare skin.
If you got stuck outside the cruiser for an extended period of time, say, to direct traffic at an accident scene, God help you. Assorted coppers tried various methods to keep cool while wearing vests, from nylon, woven mesh undershirts to not wearing the back ballistic panel. I went to the Ohio State Highway Patrol academy with a guy from Marion county who ended up getting shot in the back in a rest area. He wasn't wearing his back panel.
He survived, but it could have ended up so much worse.
At the end of the shift in the locker room, when we'd gear down, you could see the perfect, wet outline of those vests on whatever type of shirt was worn under the vest. I learned early on to bring an extra T-shirt to change into for the trip home, the damp duty-worn shirt balled up and in my gear bag.
Then there was the smell. You've never savored the aroma of a police locker room in late August...to me, it was five times worse than a high school football locker room. We'd hang our vests on hangers, body-side out, to dry out before the next shift; most of us had two vest panel carriers so we could launder one when the stale-sweat stench started to get overpowering, though it was a pain to change out carriers.
Bulky and uncomfortable as they were, someone finally came up with the idea of a protective vest designed to be worn on the outside of the uniform shirt, which is what you're seeing now with a lot of police agencies. Lexington, the PD I worked for the last eleven years of my career, has gone to that style of vest. Officers who use them seem to like them, but I don't think I would...because I'm a throwback.
I'd go back to a hot, humid August afternoon in 1986 and wear my old bulletproof vest again.
In a heartbeat.
Early 1980s bulletproof vest
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