Posted July 18, 2015 11:00 am by Comments

By Dan Zimmerman

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After coming home from Vietnam, I became a patrol officer in a small department in the south suburbs of Chicago. Although having spent almost three years in heavy combat, I was way too immature to be a cop but I did some good things, screwed up a couple of others and had some moments that still stay with me more than 40 years later . . .

This was long before modern telecommunications. When I started, my department was still getting used to radios in squad cars and every senior officer could remember when patrol officers received their calls by seeing a flashing red light on the village water tower which indicated they should call in to the department from a pay phone.

When I was hired, they had just received their first “walkie-talkies” which were cumbersome bricks made by Motorola. They were a handful and their extendable antennas were always getting broken when officers forgot to push them down into the radio before closing a door, or worse yet, by a combative prisoner.

Our radio frequency was shared by 35 different south suburban police departments and at one time there could be as many as 300 police units on duty, all supported …read more

Source:: Truth About Guns

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