Every PD in the country should have a Growler, but the PC won't advertise it because they're afraid of hurting their image. They want to be LOVED. In this critical hour we don't need love, we need WEAPONS -- the newest and best and most efficient weapons we can get our hands on. This is a time of extreme peril. The rising tide is almost on us. . . but you'd never know it from reading The Police Chief. Let's look at the June 1970 issue:

The first thing we get is a bunch of gibberish written by the police chief of Miami, Florida, saying “the law enforcement system [in the U.S.A.] is doomed to failure.” Facing this is a full-page ad for the Smith & Wesson “Street Cleaner,” described as a “Pepper Fog tear smoke generator. . . loaded with a new Super Strength Type CS [gas] just developed by Gen. Ordnance.” The “Street Cleaner” with Super CS “not only sends the meanest troublemakers running. It convinces them not to come back. . . You can trigger anything from a 1-second puff to a 10 minute deluge. . . Do you have a Street Cleaner yet?”

In all fairness, the Pepper Fogger is not a bad tool, but it's hardly a weapon. It may convince trouble-makers not to come back in ten minutes, but wait a few hours and the scum will be back in your face like wild rats. The obvious solution to this problem is to abandon our obsession with tear gas and fill the Street Cleaner with a nerve agent. CS only slaps at the problem: nerve gas solves it.

Yet the bulk of all advertising in the PC is devoted to tear gas weapons: Federal Laboratories offers the 201-Z gun, along with the Fed 233 Emergency Kit, featuring “Speed-heat” grenades and gas projectiles guaranteed to “pierce barricades.” The AAI Corporation offers a “multi-purpose grenade that can't be thrown back.” And, from Lake Erie Chemical, we have a new kind of gas mask that “protects against CS.” (This difference is crucial; the ad explains that army surplus gas masks do well enough against the now-obsolete CN gas, but they're virtually useless against CS -- “the powerful irritant agent that more and more departments are turning to and that's now 'standard' with the National Guard.”)

Unfortunately, this is about as far as The Police Chief goes, in terms of weapons (or tools) information. One of the few interesting items in the non-weapons category is a “scrambler ” for “police-band” car radios -- so “the enemy” can't listen in. With the “scrambler,” everything will sound like Donald Duck.