If Barney Fife Had Speed Loaders

In the days before semi-automatics took center stage in the world of law enforcement, police officers carried revolvers as their weapons of choice. Cowboys called them six-shooters, and many modern gun buffs often refer to them as wheel guns because their cylinders turn like the wheels of a car or carriage. Shooting enthusiasts love them. Even Deputy Barney Fife, one of my favorite all-time cops, carried a revolver while keeping the good folks of Mayberry safe and sound.

Why, then, if everyone loved revolvers, did police agencies make the switch from six-shooters to semi-automatics? Well, the answer is simple—law enforcement officers were often outgunned by semi-automatic-toting bad guys.

Most revolvers are capable of firing only six rounds of ammunition before needing a re-load (there are exceptions). Semi-automatics can pop off fifteen or sixteen rounds as fast as a shooter can pull the trigger. Therefore, during a gun battle officers had to reload two or three times before the crook emptied his first magazine.

Needless to say, reloading a revolver during a shootout was a problem.

New Picture

Cops back in the pre-semi-auto days (me included) carried spare ammunition in rectangular leather containers called dump pouches.

Dump pouches typically hold six bullets, or so, and are attached upside down to the officer’s utility belt.

To access the extra bullets, officers simply unsnapped the pouch cover and the contents, since the pouches were upside down, “dumped” into their waiting non-gun hand. The officer then fed the individual rounds, one at a time, into the open slots in the revolver’s rotating cylinder. Needless to say, this is far easier said than done when someone is shooting round after round in your direction.

New Picture (1)

In the photo above, Barney’s left hand rests on one of the two dump pouches on his utility belt. His index finger touches the other. The deputy-in-training also carries two dump pouches on his duty belt. Both are directly below the ticket book. Release snaps are clearly visible near the bottom of each pouch.

*Note – The thin vertical leather strap (with center snap) located to the right (your left) of the deputy-in-training’s belt buckle is called a belt keeper. Its purpose is to attach the duty belt firmly to the regular dress belt. Keepers are used to prevent the gun belt/duty belt from sliding down over the hips. In the above photo the keeper is there, but it’s obviously not used properly.

To solve the problem of slow reloading came in the form of speed loaders. Speed loaders hold six rounds of ammunition that are perfectly aligned with the bullet slots in a revolver’s cylinder. A twist of a knurled knob on the end of the speed loader releases all six rounds at once. Shooters could now easily and quickly re-load their revolvers in tense situations, even in the dark.

357.jpg

Revolver, speed loaders, and speed loader pouches. The pouches attach to a police officer’s duty belt.

357-open-cylinder.jpg

A revolver’s cylinder is designed to swing out for reloading. The knurled button between the hammer and the wooden grip is the cylinder’s release button.

cyl31.jpg

Speed loaders position rounds so they line up perfectly with the bullet slots in the cylinder.

speed-loader-2.jpg

A twist of the knob in the officer’s right hand releases all six rounds at once.

Speed loaders are a wonderful tool. However, they don’t solve all revolver woes…

New Picture (2)

/by
,

CS Gas and Crying Cops

It was a blustery, cold night in the mid 1980s, sometime near Christmas, when I had my first taste of tear gas. It wasn’t pretty. Not at all.

A man who was zonked-out-of-his-mind-high and terrifically “wired”after days of binging on crack cocaine, decided to pull a 9mm handgun on his mother, threatening to kill her. The frantic and extremely frightened elderly woman somehow managed to  escape her home unharmed and then call 911 from the home of a nearby neighbor.

I was in plainclothes that night and was riding with a sheriff’s captain. We’d taken a dinner break and stopped by a holiday gathering of his family members. He was driving his marked police car and parked it at the curb in case we needed to make a hasty departure.

The house was small—kitchen, living room, two bedrooms, and a hall bath. It was quite warm and cozy inside. Cedar logs crackled in a brick fireplace sending their pleasant scent wafting throughout. People were wall to wall in both the living room and kitchen. A couple of men stepped out on the small front concrete porch to smoke cigars. The partying family members were not lacking in smiles and laughter. Not one frown to be seen.

We’d filled a couple of paper plates with homemade goodies—country ham biscuits, candies, pecan pie, cookies, and the like. We’d also filled a couple of small plastic cups with homemade eggnog (no booze).

The captain and I had just sat down to enjoy our treats when the call came in. Shots fired. Officers were under fire and requested our assistance.

When we pulled up at the scene chaos was already in high gear. The two responding officers had taken a position of cover in the driveway behind their patrol cars. Backup officers were on the scene with more on the way. Each were crouched behind some portion of a police vehicle. The shooter had broken out glasses in two large front windows and was taking wild shots toward the officers. We later learned that he had plenty of extra ammunition and magazines.

The captain took charge and assigned several officers to posts around the perimeter, including at rear and side entrances. Water and electricity were cut to the home. The plan was to fire a tear gas canister into the house, hoping to flush him out. The captain carried a 37mm tear gas gun in the trunk of his car.

Fire and rescue were called to the scene and were staged a safe distance away. Sometimes tear gas canisters ignite materials inside a home, thus the need for the fire crew. Obviously, the barricaded suspect, or a wounded officer, might need medical attention.

Tear Gas = ortho-chlorobenzylidene malononitrile (CS gas)

Once everyone was in place the command was given for the subject to come out of the house or tear gas would be launched. The order was given three times with enough time in between to allow the man to come outside. After the third announcement followed by a bit longer wait time, hoping he’d surrender, the captain fired a Type Il-Single-Thickness Penetrator round through a large front window, shattering the remaining glass and parting the curtains in its wake.

Type Il-Single-Thickness Penetrator rounds are designed to penetrate materials such as single-glazed windows, plywood sheathing, or drywall.

We again sounded the command to come out, but nothing. After waiting for a rather long time, another round was fired. Still nothing. Moving to the rear yard, the captain fired rounds through more window, including basement windows.

We waited.

Nothing.

Finally, a team of three officers donned protective gear, a shield, and masks, and then entered the home. They searched for long time but came out empty-handed. They said he’d somehow escaped.

Well, we on the outside knew there was no way. But they were adamant, saying they’d searched every single nook and cranny, from attic to basement.

The captain gave me one of his “looks” and told me to follow him. We were going to have a look for ourselves. So in we went. No protective gear (I wasn’t even wearing a vest), and no masks. I was armed with a Chief’s Special 5-shot revolver and the captain a .357 revolver.

We searched the home, coughing and crying all the way down to the basement, clearing one room at a time. Eventually the captain opened a closest door and saw a large pile of clothing. He poked it with his Maglite and the man leapt up like a clown in a Jack-in-a-Box.

The next sound I heard was a loud “Ding,” sounding like a baseball being slammed by an aluminum bat. The Captain nailed the guy dead center between the eyes and he went out like a light.

Together, with tears rolling like those of bawling babies, we carried the limp man outside and handed him over to EMTs.

The man used the time between warnings to wet several bath towels in the water inside the toilet tanks. Then he used them and the clothing pile to shied himself from the CS fumes.

Since EMS was busy with their newly handcuffed patient and had no time for either the captain or me, we spent the next several minutes flushing my eyes and skin using a water hose in a neighbor’s yard.

CS Gas – irritate the eye, mucous areas, the skin and airways. It causes immediate “crying” and convulsive eyelid closing. It slightly burns the skin and even causes sneezing, cough, a severe runny nose, and sometimes nausea. As I stated above, it’s not nice.

 

/by

No Sweat: Solving Crimes and a Sweaty James Brown

I’ve played in a number of bands over the years and each had it’s own particular flavor, or style of music. I played trumpet in a jazz band, guitar in several rock bands, drums in both rock and church groups, and I played bass in rock, raggae, and groups with a heavy leaning toward soul, like bands who covered groups such as The Temptations, Sly and the Family Stone, A Taste of Honey (I loved thumping out the bass line in “Boogie Oogie, Oogie”), and Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes.

But it was James Brown, another superstar musician, who came to mind when I selected the topic for today’s article and this was so because of two points. One: during his action-packed performances this iconic man of soul perspired heavily, spewing liquid like a human lawn sprinkler. Two: sweat is the focus of this post.

In a Cold Sweat

“When you kiss me
And ya miss me
You hold me tight
Make everything all right

I break out – in a cold sweat.” ~ James Brown, Cold Sweat

Actually, Brown plays no role in this piece, but the mention of his appearance on stage brings about an excellent mental picture that ties in with sweating, so off we go …

As you know, our skin is our body’s largest organ. It’s also the fastest growing. Skin is our own personal gift-wrapping, a covering that protects our “insides” and it prevents our important “stuff” from leaking out onto our furniture, floors, and city streets.

Skin is amazing; it’s made up of three layers, and it’s complicated. A lot goes on in and on our skin, such as temperature regulation and a part of that is due to the constant contraction and dilation of the blood vessels that live near the skin’s surface. This expanding and contraction controls how we transfer heat from our bodies.

Also aiding in temperature control is sweat.

Singer James Brown’s sweaty performances weren’t part of his act. Instead, his body produced sweat to help cool him as gyrated and crooned while under all those hot stage lights. Yes, Brown’s 650 sweat glands per square inch (that’s how many we each have) remained in constant overdrive when he and his band were in front of frenzied audience.

No Sweat

The familiar phrase “No Sweat” means simply that a task is easy, and it’s possible that we could hear its humble use, for example, when a case is wrapped up and a killer is behind bars.

Reporter: “Wow, you caught that killer quickly. How’d you do it?”

Detective: “No sweat.”

However, based on new crime-solving technology, “No Sweat” could indicate the possibility that a crime goes unsolved. This is where James Brown and his perspiration enter the equation.

Picture James Brown walking through a hotel lobby after one of his sweaty performances. Gravity pulled those droplets of perspiration downward. Some, of course, were absorbed into the material of his clothing but others fell to the floor, on furniture, and they transferred to anything he touched, including telephone receivers, and ink pens when signing autographs, etc.

The same is true for eothers who touches an object. Everyone leaves behind very small, invisible traces of perspiration. And, like us, bad guys are also human with human skin that is also comprised of 650 sweat glands per square inch. And they, too, leave behind those invisible specs of perspiration.

With that in mind, scientists have developed a means of analyzing deposited perspiration, with results that provide insight as to the number of people who were present at crime scenes. And, they’re able to produce those results in real time while on those scenes.

According to Jan Halámek, an assistant professor of Chemistry at the University at Albany,  each of our skin secretions are different and, therefore, unique to us. Meaning that your sweat is different than the sweat produced by the sweat glands of Jeffrey Dahmer (thank goodness).

The makeup of our sweat is so distinct that it is as unique as our fingerprints. So unique that the chances of two people having the same levels of lactate, urea, and glutamate, the three metabolites examined, is, well, essentially zero.

For now, though, investigators will have to settle for knowing only the number of people who visited a crime scene, but not their names. This is so because the levels of metabolites in humans vary with exercise and/or diet. The same is true when a person is ill.

Someday, though, someone will start a sweat database much like fingerprint and DNA databases, but with instant results. Yes, in the near future, it’s possible that a detective walks into a crime scene, holds a SweatDetector 2000 to a doorknob, and within seconds the killer’s name, address, and shoe size pops up on a handheld monitor.

And, if a case goes unsolved we’ll most likely see a phrase used to mean the opposite of what it does today, such as when a detective responds to the reporter’s question, “Why couldn’t you solve the case, Investigator?”

Her reply … “No sweat.”

 

/by

Oh Yes, Oh Yes, Oh Yes. This Honorable Cop-Car Court is Now In Session

We all use them, those convenient “never-have-to-get-out-of-our-car” establishments, the joints that help us in our quests to not have to get off our ample rear ends to do, well, just about anything.

You know the places I mean, the drive-through fast food joints, drive-through coffee shops, and even drive-through funeral homes where occupants of minivans and Hondas can pull up to a viewing window to see dear old Uncle Sammy laid out in his finest Sunday “go to meetin'” seersucker suit while you listen to your favorite jams playing on Sirius radio.

Now, believe it or not, there’s a new drive-through that’s possibly coming to your town—Court in a Cop Car.

Court in a Cop Car

Yes indeed, no longer will Billy Buck Stealsstuff have the added worry of wondering how long he’ll have to wait before he gets a bit of face time with a judge, the official who he hopes and prays will grant him a low bail amount so he can get back home in time to watch the latest “can’t miss” episode of Swamp People.

Billy Buck loves, loves, loves to hear good ‘ol boy Troy Landry yelling “choot ’em” (shoot him) to the deckhand du jour, the person wielding the rifle that’s used to pop the gator between the eyes so the tobacco-chewing pair can reel in their catch without becoming the gator’s appetizer. It’s can’t miss television, so Billy Buck is extremely happy when he hears the arresting officer call for the department’s shiny and new specialized car.

Nope, there’s no wait time with Motorola’s newly- and specially-designed and soon-to-be patented police car, a vehicle that features a built-in weapon scanner in case Billy Buck is carrying a concealed firearm or knife, etc., an air filter that detects the presence of alcohol and drugs, and a combined fingerprint scanner and facial recognition system that conducts instant background checks.

Next, and here’s the best part of this judiciary contraption, by making use of several video screens, cameras, and microphones mounted into the car, Billy Buck, by live video feed to a courthouse, instantly meets both his public defender and the judge. Then, after a computerized virtual assistant explains the process, a brief hearing is then held. If the judge on the other end of the video allows a bond to be posted, the funds are collected on the spot—cash or credit card, please. If not, and here’s the cool part, the car takes the suspect to jail to be processed.

Ah, I sense your confusion. Yes, the car is autonomous, meaning there’s no driver. It arrives to the scene on its own after it’s summoned there by the arresting officer, and it drives itself to the jail. Therefore, officers are free to go back to patrolling the streets and answering calls instead of spending a couple of hours mind-numbing hours babysitting the bad guys during the processing/booking stage.

I suppose we’ll soon see group of autonomous police cars parked outside a drive-through doughnut shop at 3 a.m.

Will there also be autonomous cop car bars where robots serve gas and oil on the rocks?

 

/by

I Spy with My Little Eye … Every Breath You Take, Every Move You Make

You’ve all seen them, those portable signs that wink and blink and flash the speed you’re traveling along your neighborhood streets and local freeways and highways. Those police-installed rolling devices that make us quickly hit the brakes as if somehow a tiny motorcycle cop will magically spurt forth from the butt of the mechanism to chase us down to instantly scrawl out a traffic citation for the serious crime of driving three miles over the posted limit.

They’re the rulers of our roads. The kings and queens of our thoroughfares.

And they are …

SPIES!

Yes, it’s true. Some of those seemingly harmless speed-reducers are more than meets the eye. All while pretending to help cut down on zippy commuters or elect to ignore speed laws, their true purpose is to capture our license plate numbers at a number somewhere near 2,000 per minute if pressed to do so.

Sure, we know the local police drive cars equipped with license plate readers (LPRs) and they’re used to help locate stolen cars and even the folks who’ve skipped out on paying local taxes and utility bills.

But these winky-blinky and quite intimidating undercover radar speed signs serve yet another purpose … to nab drug and human traffickers and money launderers, and, well, practically any criminal type who travels the roadways, especially on high drug and money trafficking corridors such as the southwest border area and up and down the northeast and southeast drug corridors, such as Interstate 95, where even I’ve conducted drug interdiction traffic stops.

It’s true, not only is Interstate 95 used by “Q-tips,” the nickname traffic officers sometimes assign to the white-haired folks otherwise known as “snowbirds,” the road is also frequented by crooks, robbers, murders, chiefs, and drug dealers and their mules.

White-haired retirees are sometimes referred to as Q-tips by traffic officers patrolling the main drug corridors. This is so because a grouping of them stacked together in a sedan loosely resemble a box of cotton swabs.

To help catch the bad guys (not the Q-tips), the DEA (federal Drug Enforcement Agency) has and still is purchasing a number of trailer-mounted speed display contraptions from RU2 Systems Inc., a private Mesa, Arizona company, but the twist they’ve added is that their roadside warning signs are equipped with license plate readers.

A Canadian company called Genetec supplies the actual reader, but two small machine shops have been retained by the agent to conceal the readers inside the electronic speed signs. One of those companies is located in California, the other in Virginia, and their job is to conceal the readers within the signs.

I Didn’t “Do Nuffin’, So Why the Concern?

Well, license plate readers are a form of mass surveillance that collects information on everybody who drives by and the information is stored in case they may someday, somewhere commit a crime.

Okay, no big deal. You don’t do nuffin’ illegal so no worries. However, the police/DEA are not just keeping the data to catch crooks in the acts of crookedness, they’re applying more and more algorithms to the database that allows them to learn peoples’ travel patterns, the precise location of your marijuana supplier, where you sleep at night and what time you left that location and, another example—medical facilities that treat immigrants, including those not legally in the U.S.

The devices provide enough data that could allow those secret agents to enter an address and see everyone driver who visited it and when they were there.

These massive electronic files are stored at various location, such as Vigilant Solutions of Livermore, California, a firm the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency uses to access LPR data as far back as five years. This is particularly useful because to law enforcement because, and here’s a new twist, some readers capture images of the occupants of the cars that pass, meaning iCE, and other law enforcement agencies, can learn if one or more of your passengers were/are wanted for crimes committed. This is accomplished by using facial recognition software that compares images from the vehicle to the recognition software database.

Officers on the streets have realtime access to these programs and they’re able to do so almost immediately using their cellphones.

When officers want to search a home or personal records such as bank account information, they need a search warrant. A warrant is not required to make use of the Roadside Spies. The data is available to cops everywhere.

All they need to do is, well, ask and they shall receive.

Every breath you take
Every move you make
Every bond you break
Every step you take
I’ll be watching you

Every single day
Every word you say
Every game you play
Every night you stay
I’ll be watching you

~ The Police

/by

You Can’t Hide Those Lying Eye Detectors

Singer/drummer Phil Collins once crooned about deception in his haunting song In the Air Tonight, and it’s his words along with recent headlines that are the inspiration for today’s article. Or are they? Am I telling the truth, or am I spewing forth a pack of lies?

“I’ve seen your face before my friend
But I don’t know if you know who I am
Well, I was there and I saw what you did
I saw it with my own two eyes
So you can wipe off that grin,
I know where you’ve been
It’s all been a pack of lies.”

~ Phil Collins

For starters, Collins certainly wasn’t yodeling about a grouping of people lounging about while in a horizontal position. His song is about someone who told a bunch of fibs—tall tales offered with an intent to deceive others. You know, like writers of fiction do so well each and every day of their lives. They’re all, to put it as nicely as I can … professional and highly effective liars.

Savvy detectives, though, as part of their finely-honed investigative skills, must have the ability to distinguish when a suspect is forthcoming with answers to basic subtly-asked questions straight from the “Detective 101 Handy-Dandy Handbook,” such as, “Did you do IT, you lowlife, dirty, rotten thief?” Or, the more advanced (for seasoned investigators only) difficult to answer, “You’d best confess because you know you don’t want to be executed by extremely painful electrocution while strapped down tightly to the electric chair … do you?”

The Dreaded Polygraph

Before we move on, you guys are aware that polygraph tests aren’t 100% reliable, right? And you know that a polygraph devices measure a person’s heart rate, their breathing, and their galvanic skin response, yes?

Oh, you’re not sure about the last one. Okay …

What the Heck is Galvanic Skin Response?

GSR (no, not gun shot residue) are the changes in sweat gland activity and their conductivity that reflect the intensity of our emotional arousal. In simpler terms, how much or how little our skin’s conductance values change during different types of arousal. It’s a sort of sweat detector, kind of.

For example, an investigator asks you, “Do you own a copy of Lee Lofland’s book about police procedure?”

You answer yes and the palms of your hands and soles of your feet remain as dry as a California summer day, and this is because you do indeed own a copy and it sits atop your desk each and every day.

Then the detective asks, “Have you ever used the book as a door stop or placed it on a dirty bathroom floor as you tended to your personal needs during the 2018 Writers’ Police Academy?”

You respond with a resounding “No!” and suddenly your pores open up widely, drenching the entire room and both you and the detective with a torrential flood of perspiration.

You’ve just been caught telling a massive fib which, in turn, leads Nancy Drew to the Powder Room where she promptly photographs the evidence, an image you’ll soon see in court.

 

 

 

 

 

The image above is an actual photo taken by someone at the 2018 Writers’ Police Academy. It was not a staged shot. I’m extremely pleased that my book goes everywhere with this unidentified woman. Never leave home without it, folks. You never know when you may need a fact, or something to stand on to prevent your feet from contacting the floor in a public restroom. The book’s usefulness is unlimited!

Anyway, that’s the GSR part of the exam. Next, what is it about filling our lungs with good old oxygen combined with the bass drum-pounding of our cheating hearts that tells police we’re lying our butts off with every word that spills from our tongues and lips?

Basically, the theory is that if you’re lying your heart rate and rate of respirations accelerate whenever you say something that isn’t true.

But what all this boils down to is that, at best, a polygraph exam is not a lot more accurate than attempting to learn your fate by dropping a quarter in the fortune telling machine on the boardwalk at Ocean City, Maryland.

 

 

 

 

Thrasher’s Fries – Ocean City, Md. Boardwalk

The upside is that you could enjoy an order of Thrasher’s delicious french fries while reading the babble pre-printed on the response card spewed forth by the machine’s mechanical soothsayer.

Instead of actually detecting lies, though, one of the major pluses with the use of polygraph exams is garnering confessions. It’s a device of trickery. A detective’s magic hat. It’s a fantastic interrogation tool as long as the person in the “hot seat” believes in it and truly thinks it can detect all lies told..

Imagine, for a moment, sitting in a quiet room where a bespectacled, slightly balding and portly fellow who’s wearing a black suit fiddles with papers. You’re not permitted to see what’s on them before he places the sheets inside a folder, a folder with your name written boldly across the tab, in bright red ink.

The man’s manner of speech is a bit soft and hypnotic but also sort of nerve-grating condescending, as if he already knows it was you, the six-year-old heathen child who plucked that beautiful daisy from Old Lady Sourapple’s flower garden.

He speaks in a monotone, staccato style while connecting a series of wires, straps, and velcroey things to various parts of your body. Small talk about what he’s doing without really saying anything more than you already now—he’s strapping you to a device that can and will read your mind.

Your heart begins to patter its pitter.

You think back to the time when told your mother you were at Judy Jenkins’ house studying when you were actually cruising through town with football team captain Ned Noneck, making the popular teen loop, back and forth, round and round, between Billy’s Burger Palace and Susie’s Soda Shoppe. Had to let all the cool kids see you in the car snuggled up tightly to Ned while the radio blasted out Go All the Way by the Raspberries, and Dragging the Line by Tommy James and those guys known as the Shondells.

“He’s gonna know what you did.”

The man ripssssss the Velcro away from your arm to readjust and then squishes it back into place.

Darn. The pen and paper clip you “borrowed” from the office.

And you did sort of look at Karen Stdueburke’s paper while taking the math test 35 years ago.

Oh. My. Goodness. Will he ask about that time when you were out town on business and you charged the extra dessert to your company credit card?”

Darn. Darn. Darn.

The man takes a seat and asks you to state your name and date of birth and before you know it you’ve blurted out every single transgression and wrongdoing you’ve committed over the course of your entire life. You’ve told of trespasses and confessed sins you’d forgotten. You even went into detail about undertipping a waiter because you wanted to save the extra quarter for the collection plate at church but instead used it to buy yourself an extra scoop of chocolate mint ice cream.

Guilty As Sin!

“Guilty. Guilty. I. Am. A. Guilty. Sinner!”, you scream as you run out of the room sweating like a pig, huffing and puffing like the bellows on an antique pump organ, with your heart pounding against the inside of your chest wall, mimicking the thundering start of Queen’s We Will Rock You. 

All this because the mere thought of a “lie detector” machine intimidated you into confessing.

You see, in most cases a polygraph test is used by to investigators who’re trying to elicit a confession. It’s slight of hand and sweet-talking that works best, not a series of rapid and long and tall red lines, peaks, and valleys on a piece of paper that seals the deal. Not at all.

It’s the person’s belief that the machine works that makes it so effective as a crime-solving tool. After all, the science behind it is so flawed that results gained from the devices are typically not admissible in courts (see Frye v. United States and United States v. Scheffer).

Still, the fear of what could come out is a driving factor of utilizing polygraphs.

You can’t hide your lying eyes

You can’t hide your lying eyes
And your smile is a thin disguise
I thought by now you’d realize
There ain’t no way to hide your lying eyes

~ The Eagles

 

There are other means to detect when a person is lying, such as EyeDetect, a system that measures changes in pupil size, the movement of the eyes, reading behaviors, blinking of the eye, and certain fixations.

Using an infrared camera and a complex algorithm, EyeDetect records responses to questions and eye measurements and immediately uploads those responses to a server. The Converus Credibility Score stating whether the person’s responses were either true or false and are returned right away.

The European Polygraph Journal reported “the mean decision accuracy of EyeDetect is 86%. That is comprised of .89 for True Negatives (TN) and .83 for True Positives (TP) and no Inconclusive (INC) results.”

So please don’t worry, because …

 

I won’t ever leave
If you want me to stay
Nothing you could do
That could turn me away

Hanging on anyway
Believing the things you say
Being the fool

You’ve taken my life
So take my soul
That’s what you said
And I believed it all

I want to be with you
Long as you want me to
But don’t move away

Ain’t that what you said?
Ain’t that what you said?
Ain’t that what you said?

Liar
Liar, liar

~ Three Dog Night

 

/by

Cops Were Doing It Before It Was Cool: Stamping

Cops were stamping

Long before Kendel Flaum, the genius behind Henery Press, started her world-famous Oprah and Rachael Ray-endorsed stamping empire, police officers all across the country were hard at work using their own stamping kits. Yes, stamping.

Flowers, Hearts, Butterflies, and Car Crashes!

In the 1940’s, accident and crash reconstruction experts had limited tools at their disposal. Basically, to document a crash scene officers had two choices, to hand-draw the incident details, or, they could bring out the big gun, the Forbes Handy Accident Reporting Kit.

The Forbes Kit consisted of 18 wooden stamps that depicted the most common vehicle types of the day, an ink pad, and a set of instructions (grasp stamp firmly between thumb and index finger, press onto ink pad, then press stamp onto accident report … duh).

Today, of course, modern accident reconstruction software, including crash simulation, is available to law enforcement officials.

National Law Enforcement Museum

The Forbes Kit was once one of the top five prized possessions of the National Law Enforcement Museum. It may still be. And, I just happen to know where I can put my hands on a complete kit (the kit in the above photos). My daughter Ellen sent me this one.

Crash and Burn

Fun Fact: Superstar author Lisa Gardner based her bestselling book Crash and Burn on the hands-on, behind the scenes knowledge she gained while attending the Writers’ Police Academy.

Lisa Gardner – Writers’ Police Academy … Crash and Burn research.

 Click to read more. It’s a HOT one!

Lisa and friends at the Writers Police Academy.

Lisa, two WPA/GTCC firearms instructors, author C.J. Lyons, and Kathy Reichs (Bones, the books and TV series).

 

Kathy Reichs and Lisa Gardner during a tiny break in the action.

20140905_211723

Homicide investigation – Writers’ Police Academy

Lisa

Writers’ Police Academy

/by

Voice Stress Analysis: Ain’t That What You Said, Liar?

In 1957, University College London researcher Olof Lippold discovered that all muscles in the human body, including the vocal chords, vibrate within the frequency range of 8-12 Hz range. This vibration, of course, occurs as muscles tighten and relax.

Lippold charted these vibrations by using electrodes applied to the extensor muscle of the middle finger. Electrical activity generated by muscles was then recorded on an Electromyograph (EMG), a medical technology designed for evaluating and noting this type of activity.

Several years later, in 1972, three retired U.S. military officers—Allan D. Bell Jr., Wilson H. Ford, and Charles R. McQuiston—formed the company Dektor Counterintelligence and Security, Inc.

Shortly after, the men filed a patent for an invention—the Psychological Stress Evaluator (PSE)— that could analyze voice recordings. It was the world’s first Voice Stress Analyzer and it was based Lippold’s work. It was the ultimate in lie-detecting technology.

Cherry Tree Mystery Solved – George Washington Confesses!

Today, Computer Voice Stress Analyzer (CVSA) technology is capable of detecting even inaudible voice stress in subjects/suspects who are undergoing questioning by police investigators.

He Didn’t Do It … Yeah, Right!

CVSA technology focuses on the inaudible and stress-induced aspects of the voice—muscle micro-tremors.

Many investigators and department officials find that voice stress analysis is more reliable than polygraph examinations, and the voice stress system is less expensive and requires far less training time.

 

 

How Does it Work?

To see how this process works, please click to watch the video below. Then see how quickly the hero of your story extracts a confession from the bad guy.

And the cop to the crook …

“Ain’t that what you said?

Liar
Liar, liar”

/by

My Audio Tip of the Day – Handcuffs

Okay, today I decided to do something different. To give your weary eyes a brief break from writing and reading, I’ve added a small bit of audio (my voice) to the blog. Please click to play the clip before moving on. Yes, that’s me and yes I’m still trying figure out how to do this. In the meantime, I appreciate your patience. You’re going to need it …  🙂

To properly and effectively AND safely apply handcuffs is a skill that must be practiced. After all, in the field it must come instinctively since officers are often required to apply handcuffs to extremely strong people. And these are usually people who have no desire whatsoever to have those cuffs snapped onto their wrists. This, too, is the reason most officers prefer to carry chain-link handcuffs. Hinged cuffs are typically used when transporting prisoners. They’re perfect for limiting wrist and hand movement.

Handcuffing is taught during the basic police academy. We, too, teach handcuffing techniques at the Writers’ Police Academy as you can see in the photos below.

2017 Writers Police Academy—Defensive Tactics

 

2017 Writers Police Academy—handcuffing

 

2017 Writers Police Academy—Defensive Tactics

*Openings are available to attend the 2018 Writers’ Police Academy.

/by

Dump Pouches vs. Speed Loaders

In the days before semi-automatics took center stage in the world of law enforcement, police officers carried revolvers as their weapons of choice. Cowboys called them six-shooters and gun buffs refer to them as wheel guns. Shooting enthusiasts love them. Why, then, did police officers make the switch? The answer is simple. Law enforcement officers were being outgunned by semi-automatic-toting bad guys.

Most revolvers are capable of firing only six rounds of ammunition. Semi-automatics can pop off fifteen or sixteen rounds as fast as a shooter can pull the trigger. During a gun battle, revolver-toting officers had to reload two or three times before the crook emptied his first magazine.

Reloading a revolver has always been a problem, especially when the officer was under fire. Cops carried their spare rounds of ammunition in rectangular, leather pouches called dump pouches. Dump pouches hold six bullets and are attached upside down to the officer’s utility belt.

To access the extra bullets, officers simply unsnapped the pouch cover to “dump” the ammunition into their non-gun hand. The officer then had to feed the individual rounds into the open slots in the revolver’s rotating cylinder, one at a time. Needless to say, this is much easier said than done when someone is shooting in your direction.

Barney’s dump pouches (two pouches) are on his utility belt, to the right of his tie (his left). The two release snaps are clearly visible near the bottom of the pouches.

The answer to faster re-loading—speed loaders. Speed loaders hold six rounds of ammunition. The rounds are automatically positioned to line up with the bullet slots in a revolver’s cylinder. A twist of a knurled knob on the end of the speed loader releases all six rounds at once. Shooters could then easily and quickly re-load their revolvers in tense situations, even in the dark.

357.jpg

Revolver, speed loaders, and speed loader pouches. The pouches attach to a police officer’s utility belt.

357-open-cylinder.jpg

A revolver’s cylinder is designed to swing out for reloading. The knurled button between the hammer and the wooden grip is the cylinder’s release button.

cyl31.jpg

Speed loaders position rounds so they line up perfectly with the bullet slots in the cylinder.

speed-loader-2.jpg

A twist of the knob in the officer’s right hand releases all six rounds at once.

/by