24 Years on the Police Beat

It began weeks after the 9/11 attacks. There was this ad on the help wanted site Monster.com. A publishing company in Torrance, California, needed an editor for one of its magazines. As an experienced magazine editor, who lived in the area, and had recently been laid off from my position as editorial director of three magazines covering the computer graphics and digital photography industry, I was intrigued. Then I read down and it said “law enforcement experience preferred.” I decided not to apply.

Days later, I was talking to a friend and told her about a magazine job a few miles from my apartment. I thought about applying, but I didn’t have the necessary experience. She persuaded me to apply anyway.

I got the interview. I started the job in December and produced every issue from February 2002 to the present. (Note: Back then magazine staffs used to work two months in advance of publication date.)

And now about 24 years after accepting the position, I’m stepping down.

Since this is my last issue of POLICE, I’ve been asked to reflect on the changes in law enforcement over the past few decades.

The Terrorism Years

Those of us who experienced the emotional and psychological impact of 9/11 can tell you one thing about it. The nation was in shock. We were enraged. We were afraid. And we definitely expected much more to come.   

There was also the anthrax. A week after 9/11 and for weeks after that people were scared of the mail. A lunatic was sending an inhalable version of the deadly bacterium in letters. Five people were killed, 17 were sickened.

Terrorism was on our minds and we probably overdid our coverage of it in POLICE. For a while just about every issue had something on the topic and we really leaned into it for every September issue.

For the September 2002 issue, freelancer and Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Sgt. Dean Scoville, who would later come to work as a senior editor on POLICE, wrote a cover story about suicide bombers . To illustrate it, we hired a bomb tech to create a prop backpack “bomb,” strapped one of our co-workers into the thing, and did a guerrilla photo shoot at a very public location near our offices. It was an excellent cover story and a great cover.

In subsequent September issues for more than a decade, we returned to the terror topic. We covered suicide bombers, chemical and biological weapons, domestic terror groups—ranging from the Klan to ALF (Animal Liberation Front)—weapons of mass destruction, dirty bombs, drinking water contamination, school takeovers, IEDs, swarm active shooter and active bomber attacks like the one in Mumbai (2008), and probably more.

One of the few times I appeared on the cover. That's my hand holding the AK bayonet. Image was shot by Kelly Bracken. The cover was designed by Patricia Horn. Tattoo is by Photoshop.

Credit:

Kelly Bracken/Police

Then, toward the end of the decade, we decided to reduce the frequency of such coverage. Part of the reason for that decision was that we had pretty much covered it. But a major factor was a conversation I had with an officer at an event earlier in the decade: “I’m more concerned about the gang boys down at the 7-Eleven than I am about al-Qaeda,” he told me.

To be fair, we covered the gangs, too. And if you look at POLICE’s coverage throughout the 2000s, we covered a lot more topics than terrorism. But it was clear by 2011 that interest in the topic had waned. 

Minutes are Lives

Probably no other non-technology topic has consumed as many of my working hours than active shooter/active killer attacks.

I’ve spent many hours reading after-action reports and media accounts. More importantly, I’ve had a lot of terrifying conversations with the experts in law enforcement who train officers to respond to some coward shooting unarmed people in a school hallway, movie theater, or other crowded place. (Thanks for always taking my call, Don Alwes.)

Although many people seem to think active shooter/active killer attacks began with the 1999 Columbine High School Massacre, the monsters who want to kill innocent people in droves as an expression of their rage have been with us a very long time. In 1927 a guy who lost a local election in Michigan dynamited the local school and killed 44.

Still, there’s no doubt that Columbine was a watershed moment in American culture. It was also a watershed moment for police tactics. Officers on scene at Columbine—following police doctrine of the time—established a perimeter and waited for SWAT to arrive before entering the school. It’s believed that this strategy resulted in the death of at least one of the victims.

After Columbine, law enforcement nationwide came to the conclusion that waiting for SWAT was not the best tactic. Numerous tactics were discussed and POLICE covered them all, from four-officer diamond formations to individual officer response. The one conclusion that it all led to is that officers have to take action immediately. Minutes are lives.

“When an armed, proactive officer is inserted into these rampage-style killings, the dynamics are immediately altered. Imagine the mindset of a homicidal student, hell-bent on murder and setting a new American active killing casualty record, as he stalks the hallways of his school. Screaming students dash about, he rounds a corner and is immediately faced with an armed police officer moving toward the sound of his gunfire. The tactical dynamics have shifted. No longer is the killer solely a predator; he is now also prey,” frequent POLICE contributor Lt. Kory Flowers wrote in a June 2018 article titled “School Shootings: You Have to Go In.”

When officers don’t go in the result is a godawful mess. Few things in American law enforcement history match the horror of officers failing to act during the Uvalde Elementary School massacre. That one haunts me. I’m sure it haunts you, too.

Weapons and Accessories

One of my predecessors at POLICE seemed to have believed it was his purpose in life to convince other cops to support gun control. For my first two years working on the magazine I would get cornered at SHOT Show by an irate reader who thought I was him. The mistaken identity was quickly corrected by me.

Speaking of SHOT Show, I’ve been to about 20 of the beasts. They just keep getting bigger and bigger. You can see a lot of cool stuff at SHOT Show, but it will cost you your feet. We’re talking miles and miles of walking. The first year I wore dress shoes. I did that once.

Not only can you see a lot of cool stuff at SHOT Show. If you are a member of the SHOT credentialed media, which I have been, you get to shoot some cool stuff. Actually, as editor of POLICE, I got to shoot a lot of cool stuff over the years. My favorites were the H&K MP7 and the FN P-90, amazing subguns with no recoil, and I got to shoot them full-auto.

Here’s the thing I’ll say to you about me and guns. I like them, I grew up with them, but I’m a terrible shot. I’m a terrible shot with iron sights, with laser sights, with optics, and with red dots. It’s a combination of bad eyes and blood pressure meds that make it hard for me to hold the weapon steady.

I also don’t shoot much. When it came to our coverage of firearms, I relied on the expertise of gun writers, including Roy Huntington, Dave Douglas, Paul Scarlata, Nick Jacobellis, Mike Detty, A.J. George, and others.

Okay, enough about me.

I saw two major firearms trends in law enforcement during my tenure at POLICE. The adoption of the patrol rifle, which started in the wake of the North Hollywood bank robbery shootout and accelerated rapidly after 9/11. And the use of pistol optics by patrol officers. I’m proud to say that we have been on top of the pistol optics story for nearly 10 years.

Still, most of our stories on firearms carried the bylines of gun writers, not me. My weapons expertise was in TASERs.

Now, to be fair, I’ve never taken the ride. My heartbeat sometimes takes off on its own, and I didn’t want to spend the rest of the day checking my pulse to see if I was dying. But experts have told me what it’s like. The most eloquent description came from the late Charles “Sid” Heal. A Los Angeles County Sheriff’s commander and U.S. Marine Corps veteran, Sid was the expert on less-lethal weapons, and said the TASER neuromuscular incapacitation effect was like a “full body charlie horse.”

One of my first stories at POLICE was a June 2002 feature on TASERs and in-custody deaths. And I dug deep for that puppy. Read books and newspaper accounts, interviewed TASER International (now Axon) spokesperson Steve Tuttle, medical examiners, and others. I even learned that TASER stands for Thomas A. Swift Electric Rifle. You can look up where that comes from. It’s weird.

Over the years, I covered the M26, the X26, the X3, the TASER 7, the TASER 10, and probably other evolutions of the weapon that I now forget.

Our July 2007 cover story was about TASER International's 12-gauge TASER projectile, the XREP.

Credit:

Axon

By far, the most interesting TASER product that I ever wrote about was the XREP (eXtended Range Electronic Projectile), a 12-gauge munition that essentially carried a working TASER to the target.

I did a cover story on it in July 2007 . At the time, I thought it had a lot of promise. But, I don’t think it proved to be very popular with most law enforcement agencies. That hasn’t deterred Axon CEO Rick Smith, who is dedicated to developing a long-range TASER. Smith’s “moonshot” weapon if it ever comes to fruition, could be revolutionary. I hope to see it some day.

Body Cameras

First, let me say that I am very proud of POLICE’s coverage of body cameras. We’ve been on top all aspects of this story—policy, procedure, camera features, storage, cloud storage, and so much more—since the beginning. We even produced a separate supplement on body camera topics and issues about 10 years ago.  

My personal experience with body cameras began at SHOT Show in 2007 or 2008. I was walking around an annex area somewhere outside the Las Vegas Hilton and I came upon the VidMic booth. VidMic was a combination radio mic and video camera with three hours of storage. Nearly 20 years later SHOT Show is at the Venetian, the Las Vegas Hilton is now the Westgate, and VidMic’s website domain is available for about 10 grand (draw your own conclusions about that).

About a year later, I came across the VieVu body camera at another trade show (our much loved and long gone TREXPO) and had a chat with its police officer inventor Steve Ward. Around the same time, TASER International launched its Autonomous eXtended on-Officer Network (AXON). The AXON was a system that featured a tube-shaped camera that could be worn on eyeglasses or clipped to the officer’s shirt, the camera connected to a processing unit that was worn on the officer’s belt. It was an awkward device, but a portent of better things to come.

TASER International quickly adopted a more elegant form factor for its Axon body cams. So did most of its competitors. The industry pretty much settled on a body camera being about the size of a pack of cards and the profession decided it should be mounted on the officer’s chest.

What the tech producers and their law enforcement agency customers soon realized is that other than battery life, there were really not “killer app” type features that distinguished one maker’s body camera hardware from another. The real innovation was going to be on the backend.

The term backend was industry lingo for the software that came with dash cams. It was all about video management and labeling files and maintaining chain of custody. And those dash cams evolved rapidly from VHS tapes to digital video stored on hard drives, flash drives, and now the cloud. (Note: We still had ads for VHS dash cam systems when I joined POLICE. And into the 2010s, I was told that some agencies were still using them.)

Cloud computing is the critical mass technology that made the body camera industry explode. Agencies fielding body cameras soon learned that the data storage requirements could rapidly fill their in-house servers. Those servers were fine for dash cams because they were only recording from the patrol vehicle, primarily at traffic stops and accident scenes.

Body cameras were different. Every officer at an incident would be recording the entire time he or she was at the scene. A major accident or a serious crime incident could result in hours and hours of video that had to be stored because all of it was evidence. That data load could quickly make a city’s IT department hate body cameras.

Because all that video was evidence, it had to be not only securely stored but managed. Investigators, attorneys, and others would need a way to access it. And the solution was cloud-based management software.

Over the last 10 years or so, body camera software has become even more capable. And now body camera companies are leveraging artificial intelligence to make their products even more useful for law enforcement.

Last year (2024) Axon, which is currently dominant in the body camera market, rolled out Draft One , an AI tool that uses a large language model to create police reports from the audio on Axon-brand body cameras.  Draft One does not create a finished police report. Instead, it creates a draft that has to be analyzed and approved by the officer. That saves a lot of time in an era when officers are working mandatory overtime to make up for personnel shortages.

Drones

Like I said, I’m proud that POLICE was all over the body camera story from the early days till now. But I have to admit, I was late to the drone party. Of course, I saw some value in drones for law enforcement surveillance and search and rescue. But the benefits of these flying machines in patrol operations surprised me.

Melanie Basich, longtime managing editor of POLICE, wrote our first major drone story back in October 2014. The story was about how FAA rules for pilots and agencies, and public concern about police “eyes in the sky,” were grounding law enforcement drone programs. One interesting note is that all of the sources for that feature insisted on calling drones “unmanned aircraft systems or “UAS”). Sorry, guys, you lost that battle. Nobody in 2025 is talking about “UAS as First Responder” programs.

But they are talking about drone as first responder. The foundation for DFR was laid in 2017 when a company called Cape (now one of Motorola Solutions’ solutions) started working with the Chula Vista, California, Police on Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) drone operation. By 2018, Chula Vista PD had a DFR program, but one very limited in range because pilots had to be able to see the drone. In 2019 the FAA signed off on BVLOS, making DFR much more practical.

Six years later, DFR has grown beyond anything I envisioned. I once believed DFR would only be viable in small geographic areas of big cities, like the downtown district, or in small cities. But I was wrong on that one.

Drone manufacturers like Brinc and Skydio have now developed DFR solutions that are scalable to the size of the jurisdiction. These solutions consist of drones and charging bases spread throughout the area. Each drone waits inside its charging base until needed. When the agency’s drone operators send the signal, the base opens up and the drone flies out to its assigned destination. When the mission is over, it returns to the base to recharge.

DFR is not the only really interesting application for drones in contemporary law enforcement. Some drones now have features that allow them to be flown inside buildings. This means these little aircraft can provide key intelligence to officers during a search or before a tactical entry. They even have speakers on them for crisis/hostage negotiation.

Better Body Armor

I’ve spent a lot of time writing about body armor, from features on testing protocols to product roundups. I’ve also spent time in body armor factories and testing facilities. So, it’s a topic where I think I can claim a modicum of expertise. In fact, I’m really proud of an article I wrote long ago titled “30 Things You Need to Know About Body Armor” (July 2009). It has been very popular on our website. Maybe some of it is now a bit dated, but it was a solid primer on the topic, as of 2009.

Like everything else in law enforcement, body armor has evolved since 2001. Now I’ve never worn armor for any appreciable length of time. Once or twice during ride-alongs 15 to 20 years ago because that was agency policy. It was old armor and it was hot and heavy and stiff. That stuff is now an antique.

In the last decade or so, new fibers, new blends of fibers, and new designs of vests have made concealable armor lighter and more flexible. I used to think that the moonshot goal for body armor would be a ballistic fiber that could protect the wearer from rifle fire. I’d still love to see that. But I think more comfortable soft armor to protect the wearer from handgun rounds is much more likely.

I would caution, though, that I’ve seen a lot of hype in news stories about armor. Don’t believe all the stories about ballistic fiber performance until the stuff is fashioned into bullet-resistant panels and tested to NIJ standards. Some materials are great at stopping bullets, but the traumatic impact on the wearer is not optimal. A vest has to do two things: prevent bullet penetration (preferably without spalling) and minimize trauma to the wearer caused from the kinetic impact of the bullet.

Finally, armor can only protect officers who have it available and wear it properly. I am happy to say that the percentage of patrol officers wearing vests has climbed greatly during my time at POLICE. Understand I take no credit for that. But it is a great thing. What I would also like to see is more officers having access to hard armor protection and ballistic helmets for particularly hazardous situations. Maybe that will come.

Well, that’s all I have room and time to say. I want to thank you for reading my work. I have enjoyed writing for you. Be safe.