I’ll admit I’m a geezer, possibly a dinosaur. You get the idea — old. I last piloted a patrol car in 1980. It’s true I drove one in 1987, but I was a sergeant, and everyone knows sergeants don’t do anything.
I joined the Chula Vista department in 1970, the last officer hired at the old, old station; not the one they vacated for the present Taj Mahal rat maze. (I don’t mean to disparage the new digs. I love them.) It’s wonderful to have a police station that is not outdated and overcrowded 15 minutes after the last moving box is unpacked. It’s just that I get lost five steps into the “Visible Identification Required Past This Point” area.
In the old, old station on graveyard shift we often had four policemen. Even though Chula Vista had only 70,000 residents, four cops on patrol was stretching it, especially when one officer might be on a transport detail to the San Diego jail. One might be taking a report and another eating lunch. That meant little ol’ you would be assigned to handle the uprising of 100 angry drunks at some party.
We found ways to shake reinforcements loose. The cop eating lunch would leave in mid-bite. The sergeant would head for your location. If you were south, the sheriff’s deputies from Otay (before that became part of the city) would respond. If you were north, National City could always be counted on to lend a hand or wield a blackjack to some deserving soul. Loved all those guys. We were a close-knit group back then. We knew the deputies and Nasty City cops by name. (Sorry, NC Chamber of Commerce. That’s the terminology everyone used.)
Roll call was informal. We picked meal times based on seniority. Some nights you were so busy you never had your lunch.
One old-timer told me, “A good cop never gets wet, cold or hungry.” I didn’t fully understand him initially. What he meant was that you carried something to eat in your briefcase. You never made a traffic stop in a rainstorm. And, you always dressed to combat the conditions. Granted, you might have to investigate an accident in a downpour. But, you had all your rain gear in your trunk.
One Saturday in the mid-70s I had to come in early for cardiopulmonary resuscitation training to keep my card current. We practiced CPR on dummies from the Red Cross and performed our certification test under an instructor’s watchful eye. As luck would have it, 20 minutes after I went in service I received a call of a possible drowning in a pond behind Southwestern College.
Two boys had constructed a makeshift raft from loose boards and went for a cruise. The raft came apart and neither of the 7-year-olds knew how to swim. Others had pulled them to the bank by the time I got there. I knelt in the mud giving one of them mouth-to-mouth while another cop, Dennis Warner, did the same to his buddy. We couldn’t save them. I was muddy, wet, and had vomit residue on my face and uniform. I’ll never forget seeing the anguished parents when they arrived on the scene. A heartbreaker. I guess I did get wet and cold that day.
I went for a ride-along two weeks ago to see what patrol was like now. They didn’t let me attend roll call, something
I’ll try to do later. I guess they were afraid I’d write something “confidential.” In my time, after we received our beat assignments, the sergeant would read the crimes since our last shift ended. He would give the plate numbers of stolen cars, and you had better write them down. Roll call was a time for wisecracking and commenting on the foibles of the citizens who got themselves into the weirdest situations.
After that, we checked out a portable radio that was about a foot long and weighed 10 pounds. They were “state of the art” at the time and afforded the dispatch center the luxury of contacting us no matter where we were. The portable radio meant we didn’t need to have the outside radio speaker on to wake the neighbors if we were writing a ticket at 3 a.m. in some residential neighborhood.
The inside of the patrol car was sparse with a radio in the middle. A shotgun stood locked in the upright position. A pad was there to write down the call and a small lamp to help us see.
We carried a briefcase with a “Vehicle Code” and a small paperback “Penal Code” to make sure we wrote the correct section for whatever we were doing. In the trunk was a box of road flares to use at accident scenes, unless there was a fuel leak. We had a first aid kit, a fire extinguisher, and that was about it. Police work was often fun for me. When I went on the ride-along I wondered if today’s cops had as much fun as we did.
What I did find out was that even though the equipment had changed, the people the police deal with had not. I’ll tell you more about people and equipment next time.
