Calling All Cars

One of the first Police Procedural Dramas, Calling All Cars helped to improve the reputation of the Police as Public Servants

At the beginning of the Great Depression, the police were suffering from an "image problem". This was less of a concern in the more densely packed cities of the East where most police-work was accomplished by a cop walking a beat. The cities installed police telephone boxes every couple of blocks, so if there was trouble the cop could easily call for assistance, and people in the neighborhood got to know the cops who walked their streets.

Out West and in rural areas, a cop walking a beat could not do much. With the introduction of Ford's Model T and a burgeoning used car market, crooks were becoming more mobile and ruthless. The police were getting cars as well, but patrolling neighborhoods from a car simply does not get cops as close to the people they are supposed to protect.

The nature of the crooks was changing as well. High profile cases like the Lindbergh Baby Kidnapping showed that criminals were becoming more ruthless. Many of the "big cases' that were broken in the previous decade were against bootleggers, and frankly, the citizen on the street generally preferred the service of bootleggers over that of the cops.

In 1928, a Detroit Patrolman and an Engineering student developed a system where one-way AM radio receivers were mounted in Patrol vehicles. The one-way system meant that an officer had no way to call for assistance over the air, but he made telephone contact with the station, a broadcast of "Calling All Cars!" could go out and cops would appear on the scene almost magically.

Five years later, the Bayonne, New Jersey police department developed a two-way radio system that was compact and rugged enough to mount in patrol cars, a model which was adopted by departments across the country. At about the same time, Ford introduced the Flathead V-8 engine which gave the police a decided speed advantage. Between instantaneous communications and powerful new patrol cars, the police seemed to have gained superpowers.

This was especially true in the spread-out city of Los Angeles, where the Mutual-Don Lee Network began broadcasting Calling All Cars in November 1933. Predating Gangbusters and eventually lending elements to Dragnet, The Lineup, Tales of the Texas Rangers, and Broadway Is My Beat, Calling All Cars is acknowledged as broadcasting's first "police procedural drama".

Calling All Cars had the full support of L.A. Police Chief James E. Davis. Case files from departments throughout Southern California were used as story material. The broadcasts opened with a radio alert read by Los Angeles Police Dispatcher Jesse Rosenquist. The program was sponsored on the West Coast by the Rio Grande Oil Company which had service stations throughout California, Arizona, and Nevada. After 1939, the program was syndicated by different local businesses throughout the country; Axton-Fisher Tobacco brought the show to Detroit, St Louis heard the program thanks to Twenty Grand Cigarettes, Gruen Watches sponsored the show in Syracuse, New York, and eight stations on the East Coast broadcast the station for Rheingold Beer.

Elements of Calling All Cars which would be used in later police shows included a scene near the end of the broadcast of the crooks in prison or in other circumstances which illustrate the notion that "crime never pays".

For more true police stories see also:

• Border Patrol
• Confession
• Did Justice Triumph
• Calling All Cars
• Call the Police
• Dragnet / Best of Dragnet
• Honor the Law
• Official Detective
• Police Reporter
• Tales of the Texas Ranger
• Unit 99
• Up for Parole
• Wanted