POLICE BOOKS - Joseph Kaiser

About the Suffolk County Police Department

At the general election held in November, 1958 the Suffolk County Charter was submitted to the voters of Suffolk County, together with a question of whether the respective Towns and Villages should transfer their police functions to the County Police Department.

The five western Towns of Babylon, Huntington, Islip, Smithtown and Brookhaven, together with the Incorporated Villages of Lindenhurst, Babylon, Patchogue, Brightwaters, Village of the Branch, Old Field, Poquott, Belle Terre, Shoreham and Bellport, duly voted to become part of the Police District. As a result, the Suffolk county Police Department became operational at 0001hrs. on January 1, 1960.

Source:

suffolk.ny.us/police

/documents/PDcal0708.pdf

Joseph Kaiser, a Suffolk County Police Department police officer wrote The Adventures of Sergeant Otto Wolfgang Snickerhaden. The book is his story of his career. According to the book cover description, “I doubt that in today's society, I could have done what I did then and gotten away with it. But things were very different some thirty or forty years ago. When a cop had a problem in his sector, he took care of it the best way he could. In may ways it was like the old west at the end of the last century. The sheriff or town marshal was hired to control the lawless and few cared how he did it. Similarly, in the early days of the Suffolk County Police Department, a police officer had pretty much a free hand when doing his job as long as he did it without hurting anyone.”