“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” - L. P. Hartley

A recurring theme that continues to wash over me is the long-shadowed afternoon of my youth. Remarkable, all that changed and how little it’s changed. It seems things are happening that never happened before, but they have. 

I find myself repeating the theme that the lessons of “our age” need to be recalled by the current age, lest you find yourself paying the dreadful price over again. 

We did do things differently; this image showing a “mostly peaceful protest” – it actually was – is from 1968, from a university library, showing local police as they “monitor a 1968 memorial march.”

That was just nine years before I joined the department. The years I served weren’t terribly calamitous – that predated me and carried on after I’d moved on. 

I had nothing to do with the relative calm – it was the ebb and flow of life. 

So often we look at the past from the perspective of the technology. That’s a mistake. Social problems are still with us, with some variations. 

There’s still theft, robbery, murder. I don’t recall the amount of child sexual abuse that is reported now; perhaps it was always that way (I’d suspect so), and it’s just information technology that brought it into the light. 

A clipping from the paper in 1977 shows the “new” targets the outfit had gone to. They look like (and we called them) “cartoon targets,” with a relatively B-21 scoring area on a cartoonish humanoid figure. The paper compared it to the B27 used by the vastly larger and more poorly equipped agency I eventually moved to. 

They used that target into the 1990s, for no reason I can imagine. This was replaced by the NRA TQ-15, then the FBI-Q (along with the rest of the state) ca. 2005. 

The B27 is still in use, e.g., for Texas CCW qualifications. The target they’d used before was vastly better. 

Go figure.

When I went to the HK International Training Division in the latter half of the 1990s, they also used a “cartoon-“ looking target. I felt right at home.

“In my day,” we had the teletype. It was actually a real teletype, connected to the “high-speed line” that came into our county, but not to the county seat. That means we ran TTY for them whenever they needed information on foreign tags, NCIC enquiries and the like. For local tags, the information was printed out and put in a manual file.

We had one of those too. 

When I started, the outfit had one radar unit, stationary only. The cars were all off a showroom floor, no “police package” units. After the first year, we got five police pack marked units, black-and-white (as the Good Lord intended), with a prisoner partition in each and overhead shotgun racks for the Remington 870s in each car. 

Our cars had vinyl seats and floor coverings. If you’ve had someone bleed, vomit or soil themselves in a car with cloth upholstery and carpeting, you’d know what a blessing the vinyl was. Just get that hose, brush and cleaning rags and it’s good as new. 

The outfit I later settled in had no prisoner partitions, kept the shotguns in moisture collecting bags in the leaky patrol car trunks. Cloth upholstered seats and carpets further compounded the misery.

But they issued handguns; that was new to me. The first one I got would cease function in dry-fire.

You check your gear, don’t you?

After I reported the problem – and was told that filing on the extractor would sort that out – I got a gun someone had chucked down a paved road, or so it appeared. It had a ca. 16-pound DA pull and had never had the side plate off. 

I didn’t fix the cosmetics, but took care of the remainder. 

Now you have mobile data terminals, there is no teletype – but a web service – and you have access to acres more information than we ever did.

That’s all nice, but I recommend caution in your approach to any situation. Consider the fact that there are people out to kill you simply due to the clothing you wear. That can be seen online too. 

Be a lover of cover. If you can’t control someone with your voice from a distance, instead of just approaching, ask yourself “why?”

– Rich Grassi