Ze SHOULDER STRAP |

OFFICIAL JOURNAL OF THE

RITISH COLUMBIA PROVINCIAL POLICE

mber 15 PUBLISHED SEMI-ANNUALLY

Between Ourselves

©) BE FIRST in putting a new idea into effect is always a source
of satisfaction; and when you get a succession of “firsts”, why then you
are in a fair way to becoming famous.

It has been that way with British Columbia’s provincial police force;
their inception was a “first”, for they were the first territorial police
force to be organized in North America, and their eighty-eight year his-
tory of public service has been periodically highlighted by advanced
ideas. In latter years, of course, the advances have been of a more —
scientific nature, such as the establishment of the first short-wave police
radio network in 1929, or the standardization of highway patrol equip-
ment and so forth. Twenty-two years ago British Columbia was first
in the field with legislation permitting the policing of organized munici-
pal areas by a provincial force. And so the record goes.

Nine years ago the force launched another innovation. It was the
radical idea that the police should sponsor their own magazine. Nota
pamphlet or a “hand-out’’, but a genuinely readable semi-annual which
would not only be self-supporting, but be of some benefit to the force’s
Reward Fund, that statutory source of recognition of meritorious
service. From the first edition the idea was an unqualified success;
today we present the fifteenth edition of that police magazine.

Through the pages you will glimpse something of the spirit of these
four hundred-odd men who police over 360,000 square miles of the
Canadian west, and you will get a hint of what Matthew Baillie Begbie,
British Columbia’s first Chief Justice, meant, when in 1863 he spoke
of the police as “‘men who are called upon to perform most thankless
duties involving great personal fatigue, exposure and responsibility . . .
who are kept upright in their present positions by the habit of discipline,
by a sense of honour, and by the hope of a speedy promotion.”

These men haven’t changed; but clad now in khaki and green they
still maintain the law, whether they drive a radio-equipped patrol car in
a busy metropolitan thoroughfare, or mush behind a dog team in the
far north.

That we hope you will enjoy the stories collected for this number is
the wish of

The Sditors

‘TEENTH EDITION Page One