Strap Cutters

A good strap cutter is actually an invaluable bit of kit that is normally overlooked by a lot of people when they are putting together their kit list but is really an invaluable addition to your load out.  A standard "decent" strap cutter from a reputable company like Gerber, specifically designed for cutting seat belt straps, is going to set you back around £35 and will normally come with a window breaker or punch facility.  This will be a good investment for many years of reliable service and provide a product that is truly fit for purpose.

As a budget alternative you can use "industrial" strap cutters designed for cutting box strapping but surprisingly effective at cutting through seat belt webbing! These are going to cost you a lot less than £35, more like £5-£10, but will probably not last that long so by the time you have had to replace it 3 or 4 times you would have been better off investing in something a bit more suitable.

As an alternative to a single purpose strap cutter Gerber have also released a version of their standard Crucial Multi-Tool that comes with a strap cutter instead of the bottle-opener/carabiner.  Specifically designed for the tactical market, this version of the crucial also comes in Gucci black!  For just under forty notes the Crucial Multitool has a fully functioning strap cutter that is fit for purpose and also packs the usual knife, screw drivers (flat and philips head), can opener and pliers.

Traffic Wands and Hazard lights

Now traffic wands and hazard lights are not really anything I thought I would be blogging about in my tactical careerer, they are hardly the most fascinating of topic subjects, but I recently saw quite a cool set of hazard lights in action and thought they warranted a mention.

The set in question was a kit of 6 "Hockey Puck" sized discs that were a clear plastic inner coated by toughened rubber ribs that sat in a plastic carry case that you plugged into your car cigarette lighter.  Within each puck was a rechargeable battery cell and the 16 LED heads, and on the centre of each puck was a magnetic contact to allow you to stick it to a vehicle or the hull of a ship, or any metal surface really and the two contact points for re charging when put in the carry case.

Each hazard light had 9 different options that you could cycle through:
Solid-On High - 8 hours
Rotate - 15 hours
Alternate - 10 hours
Quad-Blink - 15 hours
Double-Blink - 30 hours
FastBlink - 12 hours
Slow-Blink - 100 hours
Solid-On Low - 60 hours
S-O-S - 24 hours
Flashlight - 15 hours

The cool thing about the lights is each one was virtually indistructable! You can run them over with a 4*4, submerge them for prolonged periods (though they float naturally) and they will work at temps from -40C to +100C.

Traffic Wands are not so cool but seemed like quite a handy little gadget.  Basically a big red plastic ice cream cone that you put upside down on your torch to convert the white beam into a glowing red beacon which you can use for directing traffic, pedestrians or just making yourself visible without blinding anyone you catch in the eye with a 100lumen white beam!  If you are working Roads Policing then it is definitely worth investing a couple of quid in a traffic wand to keep in the back of your car....the Hazard light system runs to about £120 quid so I would push for stores to kit you out with one of these!!!

Bivvy Poles - WTF

Just a very quick post to rant about the state of basic issue kit.....Why are Royal Marines Reserves (not sure about Regs) expected to buy their own Bivvy Poles?  Ludicrous, you get issued a bivvy but no poles! This is pretty standard issue and given that maybe 10% of recruits make it to getting a green lid for 90% of new recruits forking out ~£15 for two bivvy poles seems a bit steep!

Polish, trouser twists, razors, folding toothbrush, shaving soap etc. I can accept, they are personal use items and you would have to buy a civvie equivalent anyway even if you weren't in... but the bivvy pole seemed a bit cheeky!

Anyway rant over.

Ballistic Eywear

There are a few major brands of ballistic eyewear available; at the top end of the market (in terms of price at least) is the Oakley Standard Issue range, lower down the price (and cool kudos) spectrum is the Swiss One Safety range and somewhere in the middle are the likes of Wiley X and ESS.

Oakley Standard Issue Ballistic Eyewear closely resembles the high street fashion brand in terms of design but with suppressed (or in some cases removed) logos. So where the regualar Oakley design might have a silver "O" on the elbow and the text across the nose piece the Standard Issue version would have a black "O" in the elbow and no text whatsoever across the nose. All the Standard Issue range are ballistic rated, only some of the high street versions are ballistic rated.

Wiley X are similar to Oakley in that they have a "fashion" and extreme sports background as well as their tactical range of ballistic eyewear (they also have a less trendy Fishing focus due to the excellent visuals and protections levels offered with their polarised lenses when operating in and around water.)  Also similar to Oakley they offer "array" packs with 2 or 3 lenses, normally clear and smoke, or clear, smoke and rust/rose which give the user a range of ballistic lens options for use in different lighting environments.

The Swiss One range of ballistic eyewear comes from a more safety focused background, designed for the needs of industrial users, but with a bit more fashion sense and comfort in mind than the tradional safety goggles you might get issued.  Don't be fooled though, Swiss One Eyewear offers high levels of UVA and UVB protection - comparable to any other sun-glass brand out there - as well as industrial standard EN Safety standards.

ESS are a more recent entrant to the market that surged into prominence when they won the UK MOD contract for supplying the British Army with ballistic eyewear for the current deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.  The general consensus was the product was acceptable, nothing to write home about, but did the job well enough, suffering from the usual complaint of easy scratching but generally robust.

Police Shop Reviews

People often ask me to recommend a police shop for their kit and equipment needs and I almost always recommend they shop at PatrolStore.com for any of their equipment or uniform supplies.

As Police Shops go PatrolStore has one of, if not the best, websites for browsing law enforcement equipment in general they have the best quality images, normally 1000*1000 pixels with a handy zoom feature AND the option to go "Full Size" with the picture view and normally multiple product shots with different angles, or a stock image and a model image as well which really allows you to asses what you are buying before it arrives in the post.  Combined with product videos which are also a common feature of the PatrolStore police shop, plenty of (what appear to be genuine) customer reviews, detailed product reviews written with the user in mind and a good "Tech Spec" sheet you really do get the best insight into your product purchase.

Being a specialist police shop there is never going to be as many reviews as you would get for consumer products on Amazon for example but PatrolStore seems to have the most of any of the other police, military or security shops and compared to one police-supplies shop the reviews appear to be a lot more genuine, they have published positive and negative feedback about both the products and their own service and sometimes include a response to the customer review with some input of their own.  As regular kit reviewer myself, I always look for customer reviews when shopping online.

PatrolStore also offer some of the best service available, the website shows when items are out of stock (I don't understand how any e commerce business operates without this feature but I know the vast majority of police shops are way behind the times on this) and they offer a range of delivery options including next day priority courier and even Saturday Morning Guaranteed (though this is a pretty expensive courier option) and of course a reasonably priced 2-3 day standard "economy service".  One of the most innovative features of the patrolstore shop is the timed delivery window for anything that goes with their courier, Interlink Express . You get an email on the day it is dispatched telling you it will be with you the next working day, and on the day you get an email AND A TEXT!!! (if you supply a mobile number at checkout) telling you a 1 hour slot in which your parcel will be delivered.  This is a fantastic feature and really cuts down on the wait at home all day only to have the courier come and go while you are in the bathroom for 5 mins and have to wait in the next day as well.

Of course you can shop for all the usual police brands, 5.11, Magnum, Op. Zulu, Maglite, Led Lenser, Peli, Tactical Jack, Lowa, Bates, Blackhawk etc.and comparing them to their rivals they seem to be pretty consistently the cheapest (esp when you add in some of the crazy hidden shipping fees from other police-military sites).  They even have a price beat promise in that they will match any other site and deliver it free so they are pretty confident in their competitiveness.

The final thing to always consider when shopping online for anything (not just your police bits and pieces) is the returns policy and when you read the T&Cs out there you will see PatrolStore offer one of the most flexible and easy to use, allowing you book your own return in online and send it back without having to phone during limited customer services hours, or send emails back and forth, another real plus.

Baton Holders

There are many different baton holder varieties on the market from a range of different brands (most designed to fit their brand and not competitors) and styles. The most well know baton brand is ASP, so much so that that the ASP name has become synonymous with the product, much like "hoover" or "biro" but ASP is just an acronym of Armament Systems and Procedures Inc an American company founded in 1976 to develop law enforcement compliance products.


Asp baton holders come in two main flavours, the rigid polymer baton holder and the material nylon holder. Both are designed to be belt mounted but the polymer baton holder has a distinct advantage over it's nylon counter part in that it can be rotated ton any of 8 different angels making it universally popular with right and left handed users wherever you like to mount your baton. The nylon style baton holder only allows for the straight vertical position. The nylon holder however will accommodate most other brands of straight telescopic batons, the polymer holder will only accept ASP batons properly and some styles of Monadnock.


The altnertative to the ASP polymer holder is the Peter Jones KilckFast version which is designed to be more universal and still offers both the security and the rotational advantages of the Asp product. The other major advantage is price, the Peter Jones baton holder being just over £10 cheaper than the asp.


If you are looking for a leather product then the best option in Price Western Leather (PWL) who offer a 3 position option (again making it acceptable for most left or right handed users). This baton holder is made from high quality black finished leather, but PWL also offer the only side handle baton holder which is made from a semi rigid nylon construction.

Maglites

The Iconic Maglite 3D Cell police torch hanging from the belt of a US TV cop is a bit of a Hollywood myth these days.  Sadly maglite fell behind in technology and performance in the torch "arms race" over the last decade and their price tag for the brand name could no long be justified.  Don't get me wrong, maglites are a classic bit of kit, solid reliable torches made to take a beating, BUT the reality is they are kind of bulky, the battery life isn't great.and the lumen out put is again short of other newer brands out there.

Maglite have tried to improve the situation with a new range of LED torches to complement their traditional xenon bulbs , which have brought them back into the game, but they still don't lead the pack in the same way they used to.  For a limited time maglite also offered LED upgrades (which were pretty expensive - almost as much as replacing your original torch, but just slightly cheaper than buying the new LED version!!!) however Maglite have since pulled the official upgrades from their range although there are still plenty of third party companies offering their own brand parts, which although not supported by Maglite seem to work just fine.  I did manage to pick up an official upgrade module when they were available for my 3D cell and it really took my sad old maglite up to a whole new level.  No longer the dull orange glow and 30min battery life, instead a piercing white beam that lasts for hours and is still fully focusable (something some unofficial led upgrades loose).  Of course the only downside is that you cant use LED torches with IR filters, but luckily Maglite is one of the few manufacturers to still produce their filament range so you can revert to one of those if necessary.

Another plus side of the Maglite range is the reliability issue, these torches are still pretty bomb proof, something that Maglite still very much prides it self on and has been the bedrock of its brand reputation.

A quick synopsys of the core range is:

• Solitaire (keyring torch)
• Mini Maglite AA (LED and Filament)
• 2D Cell (LED and Filament)
• 3D Cell (LED and Filament)
• 4D Cell (Filament Only)

But there are also some re chargable and multimode maglite models like the XL200, ML125 and the Mag Charger System which round out the range as well as complimentary Maglite Holders Pouches