Bat-Belt

I have been working as an officer for about 4 months now and I think I may finally have my duty belt figured out. Why did it take so long?

In the academy, you do not have a choice how your duty belt is setup. You have your weapon, cuffs, silent key holder (with one handcuff key and whistle), baton/baton ring and your magazine pouch, in that order. You also have your pens in you pocket and a notepad in your back pocket. You have to have it exactly this way and you don't have all that much to worry about. Your weapon is not loaded and there are no rounds in your magazines. Nice.

Now that I am on the streets things change. I now have just on my belt silent key holder (with way more keys), weapon with weaponlight (16 rounds), pepper spray, two handcuff cases, full size flashlight ring, radio holster, collapsible baton holster, drop down taser holster (with small flashlight, two taser carts and latex gloves attached) and finally my magazine pouch (another 24 rounds). I also have on my person, my cell phone, field interview cards, pocket reference book, liquid paper tape (a must have!), two pens, a couple of pocket knives, black gloves, backup weapon (10 rounds) and my vest. I really need to weigh myself before and after sometime to see how much shit I am carrying around. Oh yah, and I usually jam my large notepad in the rear when I am on a call. That small notepad is next to useless. I only use it when I don't have the larger one.

That is a lot of stuff to put on your person!! So I have been tweaking the location of all of this crap since day one. At one point I had my collapsible baton closer to my mag pouch and I found out that certain times I would get in my car and the damn thing would jab into my gut. So now it is directly on my off weapon side. If it wasn't for the drop-down taser holster, I would still have some issues with space.
I also changed the orientation of my magazine pouch so that it is horizontal. After a 12 hour shift of that thing jamming into my bladder and I felt like I had to piss constantly. So now I have to re-train myself to pull out my mags horizontally...small price to pay, in my opinion.


Now I have seen officers who have room for all of this stuff and more, but they are overweight to say the least. I have no idea how those tiny female officers do it. I am going to have to take a closer look at their duty belts sometime. I am guessing they have to lose something or be even more creative than me.

It almost makes me miss the simple setup of the academy...but not enough to do that over again. =)