Page 353 - NIXBOOK

POLICE RADIOS

Our portable radios also improved. The first ones we had were clunky heavy things, with big square ni-cad battery packs that
clipped onto the bottoms. When I started out, the radios had I think all of about 6 channels, and there was not even any kind
of a display screen. Just a couple of knobs on the top. See below for the technological progression:

This was a pretty good improvement over not having portable radios at all though; some the older cops would tell me about the
old days when the only radio technology was for the cars only. When the officers got out of their cars they had no communication
with other officers or the dispatch center. If they felt like they needed to keep an ear on the radio while they were out of the car,
(like on a traffic stop) they would switch the car radio to the outside loudspeaker which was either on the front bumper or
behind the front grill, so if they were 100 feet away from their car they’d be able to hear the dispatcher hollering for them. Of
course so would anybody and everybody else. And if they had to get out of their car and go do something, they’d be out of
contact with dispatch until they got back to their car and checked in.

After I had been a cop for a few years we got shoulder mics, which allowed us to clip the speaker and microphone unit thing
either onto a shoulder epaulets or on the front of a shirt. This meant we could hear the radio better and even turn the volume
down so only we could hear it and not the bad guys, and we could key the mic without having to extract the radio from its
holster first. Then the police radio manufacturers started offering in-ear speakers and small clip-on microphones, like the secret
service guys had. This gave us the ability to receive our communications with the dispatch center in complete and discrete
privacy. That idea was born as many officers across the country would have their tactical sneaky cover blown by portable radios
suddenly going off while trying to sneak up on a bad guy, typically at his door or under a window. Imagine getting called to a
domestic violence fight at a house at night. You tactically and quietly approach the front door. You’re listening to the couple
inside yelling at each other and you’re assessing the situation. Suddenly your portable radio, which for some reason has been
turned up to full volume, suddenly blares out something like “CENCOM SIX PAUL TEN CODE FORTY FIVE!” and your element
of surprise is ruined. Or even worse, you’re talking to a bad guy and the dispatcher comes over the air and starts telling you how
many warrants he has for his arrest. Sometimes the bad guys knew that already, other times it would be a surprise to them and
when they heard it out loud, that would give them time to react and some of them would suddenly go into flight or fight mode.
But with the in-ear speaker and the capability to receive all information just to our ears only, the bad guys wouldn’t get a heads-
up when we got new information about them.
And our car radios got upgraded over the years too, of course. Newer models had display screens, and always more menu options
than I could ever even begin to try and understand, because I didn’t work in a big metro area and cross jurisdictions that required
switching over to different radio frequencies 3 or 4 times a shift so I never had to learn all that complicated stuff. The 80’s and
90’s car radio models looked like these: