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Old 03-09-2013, 09:53 PM
Delos Delos is offline
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Join Date: Dec 2012
Location: North Dakota
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Default Sometimes you just need a cop with lights and radio

It was good when the police went to flashing red light, then rotating red light in center of roof. The light bars across the roof were great.
The red light or lights were first on the side by rearview mirrors I think. Anyway the solid red light was too easy for jerks to copy.
Flashing light, particularly two flashing lights were really good. When they tossed in blue better yet.

It really wasn’t that long ago that small town police still had no radios and at night looked for a red light lit on a telephone pole at center of town. That light told them to go to the station, unlock it, and answer the phone.

As a kid mom warned all of us sternly not to ever get in any car except with a uniformed policeman in a police car. (The only stranger you can trust).

At a carnival once, when I was young (1948? before television?), I remember a full uniform policeman, in modern police car, showing off the first “radio car”. Almost science fiction stuff to look in the open door of that police car and see a two way radio (we listened to one way radio receivers in our houses each night). Obviously the days of the Bonnie and Clyde’s outrunning police cars were over (hey, a two way radio!). No more running for the next county, because he could now call a dispatcher and she would call the next county. Or state? But we did not know that then.

One writer referred to the uniformed police as “Harness Bulls”, who did the heavy lifting. It did not catch on but the point was clear. Bad crimes need immediate response with identifiable police that need no introduction. In bad accidents someone had to get together and give instructions to tow truck drivers and move traffic for them as needed. Detour people onto frontage roads as needed. Firemen and ambulances need to get vehicles close, and not get run over. Someone in plane clothes directing traffic with a weak flashlight is not as good, unless that is all you’ve got.

I was once between cities at midnight, on a mountain highway, with a crowd who had stopped, and a young lady who was breathing, unconscious and not bleeding, laying beside her upside down car maybe 30 or so feet off the road. A medical helicopter was soon above us but could not land until a policeman would arrive and block the highway for a landing spot. Too many trees and hills. We searched the area for anyone else that might have been thrown from the car. Then being late for work I left. Next day I read in newspaper that she had died. Cell phones were the new thing so I bought one.

At that time when a person called 911 on a cell phone the first question that was ask was “what city please” or some such. If you did not have a city name and an address the conversation would get tough to do.

At night our large county had one highway patrol, one county sheriff, and one small town city policeman. They could only communicate because they bought radio shack police scanners that would scan to the others frequency. Maybe if the accident was just a little further down the road, a bigger city was maybe 15 miles away.
Otherwise our Deputy and Highway patrol might have been 50 miles away up the mountain?
If only we could have talked to that chopper. We could have lit up the highway with blinking tail lights. Lit up a landing area with headlights. Obviously the chopper people knew more than us (hopefully - in a perfect world). (In my next life I want to care a little less about others - particularly a young lady laying by the road who might have stopped at the bar after work - who had a corrections officers coat in back of her car - who did not make it past that corner with the ten or so foot rise that was okay for sober people doing the posted speed limit).
Anyway we just needed one marked radio car with a trunk full of flares to block two lanes of a divided highway that night. Or for that chopper to take the bull by the horns and flip on his loud speaker, and shine his spotlight on a landing area instead of just the lady.

(I would not do well as a street cop)
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