JULY 2021 Blues Vol 37 No. 7

Let’s take a walk down

Let’s take a walk down memory lane for a moment. Back in, let’s say the 80’s and 90’s, Law Enforcement and the “technology” available to us was well, not what it is today. And in some respects, that’s awesome! For example, you could, comfortably fit two six-foot-tall grown men in fill gear, in the front seat of a just about any patrol unit. “Gremlins” and “Dodge Diplomats” excluded. Oh, and the Plymouth Grand Fury. In the late 80’s and 90’s there was this “Midsize” police vehicle craze. It kind of worked and it kind of didn’t. The radios we had, they worked! Now, they didn’t have 5 million channels in them but, you never got a “busy signal” from an old MX 350!!! We had something called a “Convertacom” too. This allowed the Operator to take his/her handheld off, insert it into the Convertacom and it powered as a “car radio” while charging said handheld at the same time. We had Channel 3 or “Car to Car” and Channel 4 “Inner-City” which was universal. That’s right, nationwide, bro. You could tell anyone “Look out on Channel 3 or Inner-City” and invariably, someone would answer. And there were no computers running that little technological wonder. Nowadays, you’ve got to be on the right regional system REX EVANS with the right bank, trunk, and channels to talk to the officer right next to you, let alone, miles ahead on the highway. The lights were incandescent bulbs with rotating mirrors and flash points. If a rotator stopped working, you just had to give the light “tap” and WHALA!!! The light worked again. Absolutely unlike the emergency lights of today which are brilliantly bright but, inconveniently complex. Somewhere along the line, there were these things called “strobes”. Now, we totally thought we had reached the pinnacle of emergency lighting when those came around. However, a few years later there were these things called LED. Kind of makes you wonder… What’s going to be next? As for computers in the cars…. well, they’ve been around a while, true enough. About 25 years or so, in the Houston/Harris County area. At first, they were bulky and not very bright. No, not that kind of bright. Like brilliancy, I mean……… Wait. I guess comparatively, they weren’t all that bright either, back then, compared to what we are running around with today. Our body armor, firearms, flashlights, radios, and all kinds of other “bat-belt gadgets” have also changed over the years. Some for the better. Some, not so much. We used to carry a revolver with two speed loaders, flashlight/nightstick ring, handcuffs, 6 The BLUES POLICE MAGAZINE The BLUES POLICE MAGAZINE 7