"I miss the old days."
You'll hear that said by pretty much any retired copper who started out in the sixties, 70s or eighties. Times were simpler then, though the anti-Vietnam war protests were a huge thorn in the sides of big-city police departments in the late 60s to early 70s. Serial killers seemed to abound three of four decades ago, too, something we don't hear about much anymore.
I started my journey of wearing a badge and enforcing the law in September of 1979, back when disco was king and country was cool, largely thanks to John Travolta and Debra Winger's 'Urban Cowboy' film. Dudes wearing cowboy hats and big belt buckles were everywhere...and not a one of them had every roped a calf or even sat on a horse. I hated it. I also grew to hate the Bee Gees.
But it sure was fun being a copper.
Plymouth Fury with the 440-cubic inch V-8? I drove one. Chevy Impalas and Caprices? Yep. Ford Crown Vics? We got a shipment of them in the late 1980s at Mansfield PD; guys would line up in the police compound in order to snag one from the guys coming in on the previous shift. I preferred the boxy Impalas.
I did not, however, every drive a Dodge Diplomat. Side story: we had a guy in the mid-eighties who got into trouble by lightly damaging a cruiser and not reporting it. Instead, he bought a can of black spray paint and did a little back-alley cover-up paint job. Of course, he got caught. As punishment, he had to drive one of the old K9 cruisers...a Diplomat...throughout the summer on afternoon shift; in addition to smelling like a hot, unwashed dog, the air conditioner didn't work, nor did the AM radio. He was miserable.
Speaking of radios, it was rare to have AM and FM, but then the music was a lot better back then, by far. At Ontario PD in the early 80s, we had our own cruisers which you could take home if you lived inside the then-village (it attained city status several years ago). As such, you could make personal, minor alterations if you wanted. I installed an am/fm/cassette player, 7-band graphic equalizer and some after-market speakers. I also added a ten-band scanner so I could monitor neighboring agencies. Before that, if I wanted to listen to, say, the sheriff's office, you had to take an extra hand radio, set it to the SO's channel and wedge it under the passenger side head rest.
The police radio was a pretty straight-forward setup, 4 channels, including the LEARNS network. If you got into a multi-county pursuit, you could use that channel to talk to any other police agency equipped with it. Some of the cars were equipped with an external loudspeaker, which meant an extra microphone in the setup. Then there was the siren control box, which let you choose between a wailing siren or a warble. The European high/low didn't come into vogue until the late eighties. I never used it.
A couple of us also mounted the air cleaner lids, which sat directly over the carburetor, upside-down, which added a powerful roar to the engine. Hey, we were young guys who thought they were indestructible, right? We'd find, though, that it was kinda tough to stealth up to a break-in in progress with that loud engine.
In my early days at Mansfield PD, there were a couple of cruisers fitted out with the Federal Signals siren system. If you had to run 'hot' somewhere, if you could get the selector switch set just right between 'wail' and 'warble', it would produced a higher-pitched warble, which sounded a lot like the police sirens in Mel Gibson's 'Mad Max' movie. I think the old-timers hated it; as I got later into my career. I'd find that some of the things younger pups did grated on my nerves, too.
That was it; simplicity in the driver's seat. Nowadays, you slide into the seat of a patrol car and there's lights and switches everywhere. There's also a mounted laptop computer that will do everything but wipe your nose. Run plates, sign off and on calls, write traffic citations and police reports. Heck, in my early days, we typed our reports...on a typewriter. Then we went to handwritten reports. Nowadays coppers tippity-tap reports on the in-car laptop. Sitting in a present-day cruiser is like sitting in a space capsule.
When I retired in 2013 we had the in-car laptops. I didn't like them but there were certain tasks we were compelled to use them for, there wasn't a way around it. Suffice it to say, I retired at the right time, having worked across five decades.
Man, do I miss the old days.
