11 Feb 02

Latest from the NJSP:

"A mere fifteen years late, we now have SIG 228s in our system. So far, they have functioned flawlessly. We're all delighted with them. H&K P-7s are all gone. S&W P99s are gone too. The State is tied up in court with S&W, but we'll never see them again, which is just fine with us.

Our infamous colonel (Dunbar) has finally resigned- actually he was canned, over the above issue and a bunch of others. He pleaded with the governor to let him stay on for a few more months. The governor told him to clean out his desk and hit the road! We all cheered. We were fervently hoping we might, for a refreshing change, get a genuinely competent colonel as his replacement. Those hopes were dashed when the governor announced that Dunbar's successor would be the often-arrested, occasionally-convicted, currently-under-indictment chief of the Newark, NJ PD. Prior to making the announcement, our governor had to have his gag reflex surgically removed.

In the interim, we poor, forgotten slobs who actually do police work have had to contend with several back-to-back classes of new troopers recently regurgitated from our ‘academy.' This was, of course, necessitated because so many experienced troopers have recently, in disgust, resigned. It takes months of FTO work to get these kids out of ‘good, little Nazi' mode (taught at the academy) and turn them into functional, human beings.

Finally, we have in all our cruisers mobile cameras and microphones, onboard computers and keyboards, stealth packages, back seat cages, and onboard printers. The cars are so loaded up with electronic junk, that there is now no longer room for, you guessed it, our thirty-year-old Remington 870 shotguns! They have now been relegated to our leaky trunks and are kept there inside of cardboard boxes. All of which means that they now have no chance of ever being used, even assuming they are not rusted shut. On that very subject, since going into the trunks, our staff of armorers have been unable to keep ahead of the rust, and summer hasn't even arrived.

The LAPD guys think their department is in meltdown!"

/John