I was wondering what regulations or guidelines dictate what type of uniform a particular officer would wear on a regular basis. Sometimes you see them wearing the standard pants and button down shirt with a belt containing their other gear such as gun, pepper spray, baton, cuff, etc. Other time’s they’ll wear pants and a polo shirt with the department logo, and the aforementioned utility belt.
Then there are the ones that I guess are on regular patrol in marked cars but look like they’re dressed more for combat than traffic stops. Tactical type vest, BDU’s, combat boots and what appears to be more equipment than normal. Are these officers around to respond to dangerous situations that might be beyond the capabilities of a regular beat cop and perform normal police duties in the meantime or are they regular officers and they choose to wear that type of outfit?
What kind of equipment is an officer allowed to bring with them on the job? Can they use anything so long as it falls within their departments rules or do they have to qualify for things like tasers and assault rifles?
IANACop: I would expect that people regularly making traffic stops would be wearing vests more often than cops who are doing other duties - traffic stops are one of the most dangerous things cops can do.
Most cops I see have tasers on their belt opposite the pistol. My limited knowledge is that rifles are rare (generally for response teams), but shotguns are in just about every car.
Uniforms, equipment, how much of it you buy and how much the department supplies, what gun you can carry: these are all on a department-by department basis. Each policing entity sets its own rules, within any applicable local, state, or federal laws.
The LE agency I worked for issues a calendar date when officers change from short sleeve to long sleeve shirts, and back. And they are serious about it. Post-election change of Sheriff can bring about a change in uniform (stripe on pants vs no stripe, white undershirt vs black, designed Eisenhower jackets for top brass). One graveyard shift officer began wearing a knit cap instead of regulation hat (upon returning from some military exercise), which was frowned upon (would not have been able to do that during the day).
All of those rules will be in the department’s Standard Operating Procedures. Some departments have these documents available online for public download. Others would probably provide a copy if you went to the station.
Each department has their own uniform / equipment regulations. And one’s assignment in that department can further define one’s U/E. Patrol, motorcycle, bicycle, traffic, SWAT, Bomb Disposal all could have different U/E requirements.
Others have pretty much given the answers. Individual agency written policy dictates what an officer can & can’t wear and when. Sometimes there is a choice but the choice is still limited by policy. The agency I retired from allowed short sleeve or long sleeves to be worn year round. But if you wore long sleeves you had to wear a clip on tie, turtle neck or dickey. No open collar/t-shirt with a long sleeve. And everything was strict. If we so much as had 1 unapproved pin or piece of equipment we’d end up in front of IA.
It’s not so bad. The hard part can be stuff digging into you. For example, I prefer my handcuff case be behind me in the middle of my back so I can reach back and get them with either hand. But this isn’t a real comfortable when sitting back in a car so I’ll slide it over on the belt just a tad when I get into a squad. Do the same thing with my expandable baton holder or it can poke into my right side. I wear nylon duty gear rather than leather so things slide around on the belt rather easily.
Just an observation (that a friend related to me ;)), LEOs have a lot of ‘tools’ on their belts!
I’ve always wondered if it contributed to a ‘bad attitude’ towards the end of the shift.
It’s not the weight of the stuff that’s the problem, it’s trying to find room on the belt for more stuff. When we got Tasers I got a thigh rig but decided I hated it, so I had to find space on my belt. To save room I got an Asp Defender that attaches OC spray to an expandable baton. But after training with it using an inert canister I decided I hated that too, so I had to go back to having pepper spray in a separate pouch on my belt. I have a flashlight that attaches to my baton. It’s a nice, bright light, and it would save the space where my flashlight holster goes. But they don’t come in rechargeable and lithium batteries are expensive.
I use an Uncle Mikes Slimline magazine pouch and that saves some room.
They come out with another thing for us to carry I don’t know where the hell I’m going to put it!:smack:
I know I’m reviving a dormant thread, but I was searching the archives, and not finding an answer to a police uniform question I have this seemed like a good thread to revive and add to.
As mentioned in previous posts, the short sleeves/no tie uniform looks to be pretty common for US patrolmen in cities large (NYC, Chicago, Philadelphia, LA, Houston, etc.) and small (Google images also seems to indicate that long-sleeve = tie, short sleeve = no tie, but that’s not relevant here). But when did the short sleeve/no tie uniform first start to appear in major cities. The late 1960s maybe? I could see it starting either in the South or in California/Florida (meaning the fashion probably started in neither region). I can’t really image a NY City Patrolman in the 1930s or 1940s getting away with wearing short sleeves and no tie in normal duty; indeed, images show many of the patrolmen wearing (to me) funky looking collared coat or tunic with rows of buttons like this.
One complication - a NY times article from 2009 shows an image of a NY Police officer wearing short sleevesstanding guard in Hell’s Kitchen in 1959 - his back is toward the camera, so not sure if he has a tie or not. And yet there are many images of patrolmen in the 1960s wearing those funky coats…
Dunno. When I got on the job in '82 the shirt/tie rules were pretty much like they are today. But at that time in the spring/summer/fall we had to wear stetsons at any time you were outside but not driving. Boy did I hate those. They were made of a straw material and would easily get crushed during a fight. Plus they’d disintegrate in the rain. And they left a mark across your forehead.
We also didn’t have name tags or numbered badges then. We each had an ID number but it wasn’t on the badge.
And no Tasers or OC. In about 1984 we got spray canisters of CN. You didn’t spray a suspect in the face with it. It got sprayed in the chest so it would disperse upward. We didn’t get pepper spray until 1992 or so. Didn’t get an expandable baton until 1994. Hence to say, I had a lot more room on my belt in the old days. Carried a revolver until 1991. Had no choice in any of these matters.
I worked in New York. The rule wasn’t that you couldn’t wear a tie with a short-sleeved shirt. It was that you didn’t have to wear a tie with a short-sleeved shirt. (You had to wear a tie with a long-sleeved shirt.) Being as most people didn’t want to wear a tie, they opted for wearing a short-sleeved shirt.
The old rule used to be that you were only allowed to wear short-sleeved shirts during warmer weather, which was arbitrarily defined as the six month period from mid-April to mid-October. From mid-October to mid-April, you were required to wear a long-sleeved shirt and tie. But about fifteen years ago, the state decided to reduce its expenses by cutting back on uniform issues and people were given a choice of which shirts they wanted - long-sleeved or short-sleeved - which they were supposed to wear year round. Pretty much everyone chose short-sleeved.
pkbites and Nemo, thanks for your input. Although pkbites moves the date of short-sleeves for cops back to the early 1980s, I get the impression it was more widespread even before then.
Just wondering when it became common accepted practice across the US.
I still admit that 1959 image of a NYPD cop wearing short sleeves did throw me for a loop…
When my roommate graduated from the academy and got his first deputy job I was shocked at how loosey-goosey the equipment standards were. They issued him a standard shotgun, vest, and belt, and he got to pick and choose for everything else. I had always assumed you got whatever sidearm, etc., they gave you, like in the army.
So what do you do if you need to hit someone and see in the dark at the same time?
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