Page 343 - NIXBOOK

Here’s my duty belt in 2016, from left to right: one extra taser cartridge holder, police radio, taser, cuff case with hinge cuffs,
pepper spray (positioned in center of back),cuff case with regular chain cuffs, expandable baton, handgun, and two extra gun
mags with 15 high power duty rounds each.

Most officers had black leather gloves to wear on occasion for doing dirty work or for projecting a bad ass look when needed.
We also had disposable latex gloves if something were particularly yucky. Back in my early days the gloves came in only medical
grade blue, or green, or bluish green. Then somebody invented black colored nitrile disposable gloves, and that was a great day.
I remember being so enthralled with the first box of those we got. Eventually all the disposable gloves we got were in black only;
because only doctors or paramedics look good wearing blue disposable gloves, you know?
Now about my first gun; the big silver Smith and Wesson. It was heavy! 2.3 pounds!

They were only made from ’85 to ’88 and if you want to see one in action, Don Johnson points his all over the place with his
finger on the trigger (!) in seasons 3 and 4 of the popular “Miami Vice” tv show back from those days.

It was actually the first real handgun I’d ever handled and shot in my life. A few years later we switched over to Glock handguns,
because those were lighter and much better. I don’t care too much about guns really, so this is pretty much all you get about
pew pew pew talk. Oh, but I’ll mention that in my early patrol days some of the older officers were still carrying around older
six-shot revolvers instead of semi-auto handguns, and most officers also still carried old side-handle wooden clubs that had to
be put on and taken off every time they got in and out of their cars. By the way, I never hit anybody with my club. Most of my
coworkers eventually stopped carrying their club batons altogether, because thumping on people was pretty old fashioned and
Poulsbo was not like a big city that had bad people running around who needed to be clubbed all the time like baby seals.