Apr 1958: Inventor Harvey Freeman looked a bit like a space alien in his "armadillo" armor, as Police Inspector Beryl Pace shot at him. The Detroit police bought four of Freeman's suits, but I have no idea if they were ever used.
Freeman lived to be 100 years old, dying in 2022.
You can read his obituary here.
Santa Cruz Sentinel - Apr 30, 1958
Holland Evening Sentinel - Apr 30, 1958 (click to enlarge)
Below is what appears to be an early version of Freeman's suit.
Mechanix Illustrated - Sep 1956
"Detectives John Simpson and Curtis McFee model their monster and a devil costumes."
Tampa Bay Times - Nov 2, 1985
Does a police officer have the right to search your car if you don't laugh when he asks you if you have any "firearms, drugs, cats, dogs, alligators, and weapons" in your car? The court said no.
United States v. Holloway, 2023 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 187752 (E.D. Pa. Oct. 18, 2023):
Officer Smart testified that he regularly asks individuals a question concerning possession of "firearms, drugs, cats, dogs, alligators, and weapons" at vehicle stops because it "helps [him] read people's body language and their demeanor." … He further testified that he was trained by other officers to infer that an individual who does not laugh at such a question is nervous about either firearms or narcotics … and that he typically receives a "laughing response" to that question ….
While courts "do give considerable deference to police officers' determinations of reasonable suspicion, … courts do not owe them blind deference." United States v. Alvin, 701 F. App'x 151, 156 (3d Cir. 2017) (internal quotations omitted). The Court does not find that laughing at a law enforcement officer while being questioned about drugs and weapons would be an appropriate response. Moreover, failing to laugh at a bizarre question while being questioned about drugs and weapons does not create reasonable suspicion to remove an individual from a car after a traffic violation.
via
Fourth Amendment.com
You might or might not be surprised at the number of hits one gets when searching for "hobo murder." I guess that milieu was a really violent one. In any case, I highlight this instance for the great hobo names. I assume "Knubbs" meant "nubs," referring to the dead man's lack of hands.
What would your own hobo name be, by the way?
The justification for this clipboard gun was that it would allow police officers to approach stopped vehicles looking as if they were holding a clipboard, not a gun.
The problem that I see is that it wouldn't take long for the public to realize that the clipboards were actually guns. In which case, even if a police officer was genuinely only carrying a clipboard, everyone would assume it was a gun.
More info:
Patent No. 4,016,666
Arizona Daily Star - Dec 10, 1976
In his book
Bobby on the Beat, former London policeman Bob Dixon described the game of motorway (or traffic) snooker:
A practice that was occasionally talked about in police canteens was the game of snooker, not table snooker but "traffic snooker". This was a game specifically played by lads in the traffic division, the dreaded speed cops whose main work consisted of dealing with traffic accidents but who also reported motorists for speeding offences. The game the officers played consisted of scoring points, as in table snooker, the numbers depending on the colours of the cars they had reported for speeding during their shift — for example, a red car scored 1 point, a yellow 2 points, and so on, with a black one scoring the maximum 7 points. At the end of a shift, the traffic cars on the division would return to the police garage and the crews totted up their points to find the winner. I never heard what the prize was.
Over the years some drivers have filed complaints, claiming to have been victims of motorway snooker.
Sydney Morning Herald - Sep 11, 1999
Of course, the official position of the British traffic police is that their officers would not engage in such frivolous games. But that even if they did, all the cars they stopped were speeding anyway.
The Herts and Essex Observer - Jan 16, 1992
More info:
BBC News