WHAT WAS IT LIKE IN ‘63
If you were hired in 1963, here are just a few of the things you would have gone through:
The hiring process from application to hire could take up to 3 weeks. That included physical agility, back ground, psych, and written.
You would then go to the L.A.P.D. Academy. The academy was 3 months long. You then spend a month with a training officer before going on your own.
Your starting salary would have been $510 a month. You rarely got overtime pay. Any late reports, etc. were on your time. Rarely did you get overtime, except Easter week when you worked 12 hour days for 10 days. You got straight time for all the hours. No time and a half.
Most of the officers took a cut in pay from their civilian jobs to come to work for the P.D.
You paid for all of your own equipment, gun, uniforms, etc. Your leather was furnished. Your leather consisted of a belt, holster, ammo pouch that held 12 bullets, a hand cuff case and a baton holder. Pack sets, mace, tasers and vests did not exist.
Most of the officers smoked. The back row of briefing was for the old timers and they all smoked. The briefing room was small.
The cars were almost always Fords. They had over 100,000 miles on most of them and the seats were usually broken and the cars would not go over 70 MPH. There was no such thing as a “No Smoking” car and usually there were cig butts and trash on the floor.
If you arrested someone you booked them. If you were a rookie you usually got called in at 4 am to book and print all the drunks. You also went to a local restaurant and picked up breakfast to bring back to all the prisoners. After you fed the prisoners you made a jail run to the County Jail.
The Morning Watch consisted of a West side unit and an East side unit. If you needed backup, a Sgt. would roll out of the station. Day watch would be 5 or 6 patrol units and a couple of traffic units,( motors, A.I.)
The radios in the cars had two channels. There were 5 cities on our frequency. One channel was for officer to officer. The other channel was for the station. Many times you could not get out on the radio because someone from the life guards or another station was talking. There were no pack sets yet.
If you needed to speak to the station you went to a pay phone booth and called in the number that was taped on the outside of the booth. For example, 10-21, booth 4, and the dispatch would look up the number for booth 4 and call you. This was also a good way to let your beat partner know where you were so he could meet up with you. It was against policy to meet with another unit while working.
We wore long sleeve shirts and ties from Sept. 15th to June 15th and then we went to short sleeve shirts. The weather had nothing to do with when we changed. It was usually in the high 90’s in Sept. But that didn’t matter. Oh yah we didn’t have air conditioning in any of the cars. Another of the uniform requirements was helmets. For a couple of years we wore helmets all the time. When you got out of the car without a helmet you were written up. Didn’t matter the reason, you had to have your helmet on. Thank goodness that only lasted a couple years. We also wore soft hats for several years. Same policy on wearing it anytime you got out of the car.
If you turned in a report with an error in spelling etc., it got red inked and you had to write the report over again. We used carbon copies to make extra copies of reports. There were no copy machines—hadn’t been invented yet.
The first time I saw a portable phone was on the balboa island bridge. The Sgt. brought a big green box and it had a phone attached to it. He cranked a crank on the side and picked up the phone and started talking to the station. I was shocked. The first time i saw a report sent over the phone lines I couldn’t believe it. A records clerk put a report into a machine that was attached to the phone and dialed a number and the report went through the machine and when it came out it had been sent to another agency. It was amazing.