Police Headquarters
· 39 broadcasts
Police Headquarters is one of radio's earliest police procedurals -- a 1932 crime series produced by Bruce Eells & Associates (the Broadcasters Program Syndicate) and sent out on electrical transcription discs to NBC's West Coast stations. Each quarter-hour opens with music and an announcer's spot, then a tight twelve-minute dramatization of an actual police case: a citizen phones in a crime, and the police throw a two-way-radio dragnet across the city to run the offender down. The files run the full range -- a laundry-truck kidnapping, a payroll heist, a hotel blackmail, a boxing-match killing, a subway murder, and, memorably, a professor's body held for ransom of his brain. Drawn from real cases, the stories were always resolved as solved on the air, whatever the true outcome. The show arrived just as Los Angeles police were first putting radio cars on the street, and it dramatized that brand-new technology for the audience living through it -- which is why media historian Kathleen Battles studies it in her history of radio dragnets and policing. Little survives of who performed it; the cast went unbilled on the transcription discs. Thirty-nine episodes were produced in 1932 and thirty-seven survive, certified by the Old Time Radio Researchers -- an early ancestor of Calling All Cars and Dragnet.
Episode Spine
undated
Police Headquarters is one of radio's earliest police procedurals -- a 1932 crime series produced by Bruce Eells & Associates (the Broadcasters Program Syndicate) and sent out on electrical transcription discs to NBC's West Coast stations. Each quarter-hour opens with music and an announcer's spot, then a tight twelve-minute dramatization of an actual police case: a citizen phones in a crime, and the police throw a two-way-radio dragnet across the city to run the offender down. The files run the full range -- a laundry-truck kidnapping, a payroll heist, a hotel blackmail, a boxing-match killing, a subway murder, and, memorably, a professor's body held for ransom of his brain. Drawn from real cases, the stories were always resolved as solved on the air, whatever the true outcome. The show arrived just as Los Angeles police were first putting radio cars on the street, and it dramatized that brand-new technology for the audience living through it -- which is why media historian Kathleen Battles studies it in her history of radio dragnets and policing. Little survives of who performed it; the cast went unbilled on the transcription discs. Thirty-nine episodes were produced in 1932 and thirty-seven survive, certified by the Old Time Radio Researchers -- an early ancestor of Calling All Cars and Dragnet.