POLICING THEN AND POLICING NOW

From using heavy handed tactics to being targeted nice guys

Man, things have sure changed since I became a cop in Galveston, Texas back in the late 1940s.

Then there was little if any training. Now we have police academies that last six months or more followed by six months or more of field training. When I was hired, I was told to go to a certain department store and get fitted with a uniform, and when my uniform was ready, I was to report to the police station with a gun and cuffs at 11 p.m.

The nightshift sergeant told me to walk a beat in the downtown business area and up and down on Market and Post Office streets. Post office Street was an especially nice beat because it had 27 white whore houses and several black brothels. I rattled a lot of doors and met with a lot of people, both white and black, and yes, those ladies of the evening too. I got to know many of the prostitutes by first name and vice versa. Today they call that community-based policing.

In addition to my Colt .38 super (a really great gun at the time), I carried a sap (black jack), a set of Peerless handcuffs and the iron claw, a mechanical come-along nipper/cuff that would make even the biggest gorilla howl in pain. For cops today, saps and iron claws are strictly verboten.

We did not have high tech communication systems. No computers. If you left your patrol car, you no longer had access to your police radio and had no way to call for backup if needed. Today there are computers in every cop car and police officers can receive and send radio messages while away from their patrol cars.

Then we were pretty much free to do almost anything we wanted to without public scrutiny. Nowadays everyone is clicking away with their cellphone cameras and anything an officer does is liable to show up on the internet.

Back then there were few if any black cops and in those police departments that had one or more, black cops were seen as “niggers to keep them other niggers in their place.” (Galveston, by the way, was the first city in the U.S. to hire black officers.) Today we have black chiefs of police.

Women police officers? You gotta be kidding. Policing was strictly a he-man’s job back then. We did have jail matrons to search and guard female prisoners and who, once in a while, would be called out in the field to search female arrestees. Today we have women that are chiefs of police.

If someone gave you some lip they were liable to get a fat lip, that is unless they were recognized as a person of influence. Nowadays if someone gives you some lip you are expected to apologize for offending them.

If someone struck an officer, they were most likely to end up in the hospital with their facial features rearranged. Today you are required to handle them with kid gloves and not use any more force than necessary to take them into custody.

If someone killed a police officer and got away, he would be shot multiple times when found … no taxpayer money needed for trial. Today, when they find a cop killer, a SWAT team surrounds the house, a hostage negotiator is called and they mess around with the piece of shit for hours trying to get him to give up.

Back then, at least in the South, most people, both white and black, did not give us any lip or assault us during an attempted arrest. Today there are a lot of verbal and physical clashes between cops and citizens when the police stop or attempt to arrest someone.

Back then, most cop killers were white, but shootings of cops were rare. Today it seems as though it’s open season on cops with most cop killers being black.

Back then there were no Watts or Ferguson-like riots and looting. Today, whenever the cops kill a black man somewhere, you can expect ‘Black Lives Matter’ demonstrations all over the country and, in some instances, rioting and looting as well. And in the old days we shot looters, while today we might as well help them carry off their loot cause they probably ain’t a gonna git prosecuted.

In the old days we threw homosexuals in jail. Today we have homosexual cops and gay marriage. And some of the lesbian police officers are as tough as the he-man cops of days gone by.

With respect to illegal drugs back then, for the most part we were making arrests of blacks for selling or possessing heroin, Mexicans for heroin and pot, and whites for yellow jackets (Nembutal), red devils (Seconal), pot and for those who could afford it, cocaine. Today all racial and ethnic groups are into pot, heroin, meth, coke, and a whole bunch of designer drugs. We’ve sure come a long way down the path to hell.

And if I’m not mistaken, the crime rate back then was relatively low. Today, although the crime rate has been declining somewhat, it is still alarmingly high.

Back then most people respected us tough-guy cops. Today many people seem to despise the new nice-guy law enforcers.

Now I’m certainly not suggesting by any stretch of the imagination that we return to the old days of policing, but we’ve gone from using heavy handed tactics to being targeted nice guys. And if the old ways were so bad, how come things today are so fucked up?