David Adam, deputy chief for the Butler Police Department, uses a computer in his patrol car at the Butler Police Station.

This is not your grandfather's police department.

During the past 50 years, the Butler Police Department has seen changes that old grand dad could only have imagined.

Back then, a cop was walking a beat with a six-shooter and hickory stick, a set of handcuffs and a ticket book. That was pretty much the extent of his tool belt.

Communication had seemingly grown at a snail's pace from the call box to speaking over a seriously scratchy radio.

Everything, or so it seemed, was done by hand or typewriter: calls, notes, reports. Fingerprints were done by ink, roller and cards.

File cabinets served as the document management system in the past. Databases were paper-based — and slow. Very slow.

Perhaps nothing has transformed police departments more in the past five decades than computers and information technology. The advances have revolutionized the ability of the police to process information.

“Police officers today are better,” said Paul Cornibe, a cop for 40 years, minus two months. “They have to put up with more than we did and deal with so much more.”

Cornibe's entire career was at the Butler Police Department. He joined in 1959.

When he got out of the Marine Corps, he wanted to be a trooper. Then, however, a man had to be single to join the state police. Cornibe, married at 19, was ineligible.

He landed a job at Pullman but only briefly. Ten days before Christmas, a layoff necessitated a life change that proved lasting.

An ad in the Butler Eagle caught his eye. The city was taking applications for police officers.

“The rest,” Cornibe said, “is history.”

His history would include a rise through the ranks, culminating in his appointment as chief in 1985. He retired in 1998.

He started on a force of 36 men. That compares to today's department that numbers 23.

But back then, there were only five vehicles — two for active patrol, one spare, and two unmarked cars.

Guns & ammoWhen he started and for years later, he and his fellow officers carried .38-caliber Colt revolvers with 6-inch barrels. On the ammo belt were two rows of belt loops that could carry 20 bullets, in all.Police back then also carried a blackjack, which was a small, easily concealed club consisting of a leather-wrapped lead weight attached to the end of a leather-wrapped coil spring, with a lanyard or strap on the end opposite the weightWhen contacted with the head, it could concuss the brain without cutting the scalp. It was meant to stun or knock out the target.Cornibe carried one, as required, but he never used it. He made that decision after seeing it, in use, crack open a head.Some officers, like Cornibe, also carried a nightstick. Cops were expected to always use an impact tool. If you hurt your hand from punching someone and wound up on injured status, you were forcing someone else to leave their job to cover your beat.

Today's police use expandable batons, rather than nightsticks or billy clubs, said David Adam, deputy chief for the Butler Police Department.The modern batons, made of steel alloy, are comprised of multiple shafts that collapse inside each other, and expand at the flick of the wrist.“They're compact and lightweight,” Adam said.Other advancements in basic tools carried by city police include the service weapon.Adam joined the Butler department in 1990. Before that, his police career consisted of a three-month stint as part-time officer for Springdale police in Allegheny County.He was issued a .357-caliber revolver when he started here. It carried six rounds.Today, he and his fellow officers are equipped with slide-action .45-caliber Glocks with 13-round magazines.Mechanically and technologically, the semiautomatics are superior to the revolvers for a number of reasons: less recoil, easier trigger pulls, bigger and better sights and, of course, greater ammo capacity.Bullet technology has also benefited police. Officers now use hollow-point ammunition rather than solid-nosed bullets of yesteryear.The older ammo was more prone to pass through a suspect and ricochet, possibly striking innocent bystanders. The modern ammunition reduces the incidence of “through-and-through” penetration without increasing fatalities.<b>Other tools</b>Less-than-lethal weapons available to Butler police have advanced over the years, too.“In the 1970s,” Cornibe said, “we got a can of Mace or pepper spray to carry.”Officers still have that option, Adam said, but they have another important tool — the Taser.The department was equipped with the electronic stun gun shortly before 2010. They've made batons and Oleoresin Capsicum spray, commonly known as pepper spray, increasingly obsolete.“Tasers prevent injuries to both officers and suspects,” Adam said. “They can also save lives.”No body armor was supplied to officers 50 years ago. But Cornibe would take matters into his own hands after Saxonburg Police Chief Gregory Adams was fatally shot in 1980 during a traffic stop.“I heard about that,” he said of the case that captured national attention, “and I went down to Pittsburgh and bought my own.”He shelled out several hundred dollars from his own pocket for a bulletproof vest.“That was a lot of money back then,” he noted. “When I heard what happened to (Adams), that did it for me. I wore one every day since.”It left such a lasting impression that when he became chief, Cornibe made body armor mandatory for Butler police.Ballistic vests are still required wear, Adam said. And over the years, technology has made fibers lighter and more resistant to puncture attacks.<b>Communication gap fix</b>Police communication has increased by light years since Cornibe's first years on the force.“When I started, the only communication were call boxes. They were on every corner of Main Street attached to telephone poles,” he said.The gizmos were metal cabinet boxes that were direct lines to the police station. Equipped with lights, they alerted beat cops of a call awaiting response.A blinking light from the call box would get the officer's heart pumping. “It meant trouble. It meant get to the call box immediately,” Cornibe said.The boxes were used by officers on patrol to check in from different street corners at different times to update central command, call for backup, or receive updated orders for their patrol area.Eventually came rudimentary hand-held radios and two-way radios were placed in patrols cars. The in-car radios had only one channel to call and one channel to receive.“Over time, the radio equipment has gotten better,” Adam said. “The system has greater capacity, it's clear and there are less dead spots.”City officers now also carry their own personal cell phones, although they are not department-issued.Another communication advancement to benefit police following the 1967 recommendation of the President's Crime Commission was the establishment of a single telephone number.In time, across the nation, Americans could use a three-digit number to call the police.AT&T announced the creation of 911 in January 1968.With the eventual creation of the enhanced 911 system, police were able to use the computer in automating the dispatch process, or computer aided dispatch.The technology allowed 911 call dispatchers to see detailed addresses, making it easier for police and emergency responders to find victims and secure suspect information.

<b>Rise of computer age</b>In-car wireless computers were another major technological breakthrough for police.The advent and development of the computer, Cornibe said, was perhaps the biggest change he saw in the department.“We started our computer system in the 1990s,” he said.Much of police work, Adam said, was arcane and tedious B.C. — Before Computers.“We were typing up charges and reports on old manual typewriters,” he said. “You'd have to type on carbon paper seven or eight pages thick. That meant you had to pound the keys hard enough to get through all those pages.”Eventually, the department got one — that's one — electric typewriter.Adam remembers the first computers at the station.“They were the old DOS operating systems,” he said, “the ones that relied on floppy disks.”Officers like himself were still learning how to use computers. It was very much a brave new world for them.But computers have sped up the business of being a police officer.For starters, computer-based reports and criminal complaints have supplanted the old hand or typewritten versions.Computers have been the key factor for police in the gathering and storing of evidence.<b>Information technology</b>An immeasurable advancement has been in information technology, namely databases.Before automated systems, Adam said, “fingerprints were all ink and paper.”Cornibe recalled the process in his earlier days.“We had a fingerprint kit in the lieutenant's office to take rolling prints,” he said. “We manually rolled them onto cards. Then we sent them to the state police or wherever to have them checked.”“It took a lot of time and effort,” Adam said. And it also was rarely useful without a suspect in mind.The Automated Fingerprint Identification System became operational in the 1990s. The AFIS tapped into computer technology to read, match, compare and store fingerprint images.Pre-AFIS, a manual search of fingerprint cards on file would take days or weeks. AFIS can accomplish the same task in minutes or hours.Last September, the technology helped city police solve a burglary.The burglar broke into a home on North Monroe Street and stole about $250 worth of coins, which had been in two plastic containers.Investigators were able to lift fingerprints from the containers. The evidence was sent to the state police crime lab in Greensburg and run through the AFIS database of 47 million digitized sets of fingerprints, primarily from criminal offenders.<b>More databases</b>The late-1990s also saw the creation of National DNA Index System, a nationwide repository of DNA from known criminals and unknown persons at crime scenes, and the Combined DNA Index System, an FBI database of criminal suspects' biometric data.Adam said police over the years have used the databases to solve cases, some years old.Information technology also gave rise to the Commonwealth Law Enforcement Assistance Network, or CLEAN, and the Pennsylvania Justice Network, or JNET.The CLEAN system, Adam said, is used by Pennsylvania criminal justice agencies to access driver's license and motor vehicle data, state criminal history records including Protection from Abuse orders, and information on stolen cars and guns and people wanted on warrants.CLEAN is Pennsylvania's conduit to the FBI's National Crime Information Center.Adam said JNET allows police in Butler and anywhere in the state to compare a facial image with mugshot databases. It includes 34 million driver's-license photosFor officers on patrol, traffic stops are now safer and more efficient.“Instead of taking several minutes to search for the information,” Adam said, “it's almost immediate.”Butler police also tap into JNET for computer-generated photo arraysFor example, the database can generate a photo array based on the characteristics of an identified suspect, thereby lessening the claim that police assembled an intentionally biased array.It used to take a lot of time and trouble for police to assemble photo “6-packs” or “8-packs.”“When I started,” Adam said, “photo arrays took time. We'd take pictures with Polaroid cameras and cut little squares in file folders. We'd tape the photos in (the squares) and number them.”Now, thanks to JNET, the process is digital and takes a few minutes.<b>Additional upgrades</b>For the Butler Police Department, there have been many other changes in tools and technologies in the past 50 years.To name a few, the department now has two police dogs that are primarily used to subdue dangerous suspects and sniff out illegal substances.Police have dozens of public surveillance cameras throughout the city, Adam said, that can help solve crimes by identifying and tracking suspects and vehicles. The cameras also are viewed as a crime deterrent.Officers used to carry shotguns in the trunks of their patrol cars. Now they have semi-automatic rifles.Today's officer has access to night-vision goggles and portable breath test devices, not just Breathalyzer machines.Police also have social media at their disposal, Adam noted. Social media networks like Facebook and Twitter can serve as electronic wanted posters, informing the public in real time of suspects at large. The department's own Facebook page debuted in 2012.Additionally, social media has created a gateway for people to send in potentially valuable tips for police.Stop sticks are another tool kept in two patrol cars, Adam said. The contraptions, also known as spike strips and tire shredders, are an extendible set of hollow needles designed to puncture the tires of a fleeing vehicle and stop it.A recent life-saving tool in the police medical equipment arsenal is naloxone, better known by the brand name Narcan. The medicine, which police carry in the form of nasal spray, can reverse the effects of opioids like heroin and morphine in the case of an overdose.“Technology has made our job better, safer and more efficient,” Adam said. “But it will never replace good old-fashioned police work and the importance of the individual officer.”

In 1968, Butler police officers carried .38-caliber Colt revolvers with 6-inch barrels. On the ammo belt were two rows of belt loops that could carry 20 bullets, in all.

Today officers are equipped with slide-action .45-caliber Glocks with 13-round magazines. Mechanically and technologically, the semiautomatics are superior to the revolvers for a number of reasons: less recoil, easier trigger pulls, bigger and better sights and, of course, greater ammo capacity.

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Retired Butler Police Chief Paul Cornibe shows his first gun with the department at his home in Center Township.