By John Miehle Cape Coral, Florida Rand reader doesn’t just shrug Editor:
As a retired SMPD police captain, your badge article (“Redesigning the old shield,” June 18) was of interest to me. The current badge controversy isn’t really new. It is somewhat indicative of the resistance to change and the deep tradition of police work.
I was fairly new to the department when, I believe in 1975, we changed badges to “Police Officer” from “Policeman.” In deference to your article, the female police officers were not the first females. We had a classification of “Police Woman” and their badges stated that. The next change was the proposal to wear cloth badges on the uniform jackets. This was due to having to always have a badge on and having to transfer it from your jacket to your shirt. Due to some perceived controversy about cloth badges, two of us in patrol wore the cloth badges on our jackets for six months. What we noticed is that nobody noticed. I wore this jacket for my entire 28 years and nobody ever noticed the designation on the badge.
Next came the “shell” badge. An idea proposed by a new officer who was somewhat artistic and thought the SMPD badge should in some way reflect the beach city status. This was the first badge I had which had City Hall on the face of it. The badge lasted longer than the officer who designed it did. A few of us wanted to change back to our former badge and then Chief Keane told us we were stuck with that one.
In 1991, Chief Butts came to the department. The badges were changed. I doubt anyone outside the department really noticed. Nobody really notices the detail of what is on a badge. A couple of us did a little experiment. I would walk up to officers, cover my badge and tell them not to look at theirs. I would then ask them questions about the style, wording, location of the wording. I can’t remember one person who got it correct.
I wasn’t there when the current badge was designed and changed. It’s been a few years, but in your article one thing is obvious, nobody noticed.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on June 23, 2007. Read the original PDF.