Calling All Cars: Radio Dragnets and the Technology of Policing

Introduction: Heeding the Call

As historians of policing generally agree, radio in combination with the automobile represented a significant shift in police practices during the years of the Depression. Radio became a technological solution to a number of problems facing police, many of which were tied to the increasing use of the automobile. The automobile enabled increasingly fast mobility for criminals, taxing the fragmented arrangement of law enforcement in the United States. Radio and automobiles formed a powerful rejoinder to criminal mobility. For example, Kelling and Moore (1996) argue, “The patrol car became the symbol of policing during the 1930s and 1940s; when equipped with radio, it was at the limits of technology. It represented mobility, power, conspicuous presence, control of officers, and professional distance from citizens” (83). Yet even a cursory look through a variety of sources of the 1930s, including specialized literature aimed at police professionals and city managers and popular literature aimed at the general public, indicates that radio represented more: police radio symbolized excitement, speed, efficiency, centralized command of geographic space, the promise of inevitable apprehension, two-way communication, masculine prowess, and modernity itself. So exciting was police radio that the Michigan State 1 i n t r o d u c t i o n Heeding the Call Its effect is electrifying as it falls on the ears of the men pledged to combat crime. It hurls an army of public protectors into battle formation. As in the days of ’49, it is a cry that heralds a battle of hardship and a fight to the death. What is this verbal symbol of modern adventure? “Calling all cars!” —Michigan State Police radio broadcast Calling the police! Calling the g-men! Calling all Americans to war on the underworld! —Gang Busters radio program opening 2 introduction Police (1936), among the earliest to develop radio for policing, celebrated their ability to conquer space and time by invoking that symbol of modern adventure, “Calling All Cars.” Comparing the excitement generated by police radio to the thrill of the gold rush, and celebrating its ability to liven up the most intimate domestic settings, the Michigan State Police glorified their new technologies as a way to herald their own success as a modern agency of crime fighting. The most memorable versions of this call, however, emanated not from the police radio stations but from the growing number of commercial radio entertainment programs that told stories of crime-fighting efforts by either police or vigilante heroes. The most vivid and widely circulated call was featured on the nationally broadcast docudrama Gang Busters, which purported to give its audience the real facts about police activities. Each week, the program’s opening featured a potent sonic cocktail of machine-gun fire, marching feet, and wailing sirens that served as backdrop to the emphatic hail of the announcer, who, speaking through a filter device meant to signify the radio itself, called on the audience to join this crusade against crime. In the American Southwest, listeners could hear the weekly call on the appropriately titled regional docudrama Calling All Cars. In keeping with the air of authenticity the show worked to convey, each episode began with a simulated police radio call issued by actual Los Angeles Police Department dispatcher Sergeant Rosenquist, who commanded squad cars to keep a lookout for the suspect whose capture was the subject of the week. Even fictional programs featured their own forms of the call. The most memorable was issued by The Shadow, the alter ego of man-about-town Lamont Cranston, who used his “power to cloud men’s minds” to render himself invisible in order to fight crime. Using radios and extrasensory perception, Cranston/Shadow frequently hailed his faithful assistant Margot Lane to assist him in his crime-fighting efforts. That radio programs would draw on the power of police radio as a central part of their program offerings was not a foregone conclusion during the Great Depression. A new group of reformers, including members of various civic institutions, concerned citizens, and those from within the ranks of police forces, found police facing, in the new term of the era, a “public opinion” problem. In addition to a whole host of social changes, police were dealing with an array of representations that were only rarely introduction 3 flattering. The most popular among them were the fictional images of the inept police of Hollywood gangster...