SULLIVAN – The Sullivan Police Department will soon be purchasing new radios and LED light bars for patrol cars thanks to an $8,700 grant from the Missouri Department of Public Safety. “This year we asked for $8,723 and that’s what we got,” Captain Vernon Zelch of the Sullivan Police Department said. “We’ve always been fortunate to get some amount of funding for the past 10 years, but this is the first year we were fully funded for what we asked for.”

The City of Sullivan must contribute 10 percent, or roughly $872, to the grant Zelch said.

More than 200 law enforcement agencies applied for the one-year grant, and the Department of Public Safety awarded more than $800,000 in funds throughout the state, Zelch said. “It’s rather competitive,” he said, noting the most each agency can receive is $10,000.

Because the purpose of the grant is to enhance officer safety and primary police duties, the money can be used to purchase items such as police radios, light bars for patrol cars, sirens, safety vests for directing traffic, road flares, flashlights, in-car cameras and more. The grant does not cover hand guns or ammunition, or uniforms. “It has to meet officer safety,” Zelch said. “It has to be an item you would use in everyday patrol duties.”

The Sullivan Police Department will use the money to purchase one car radio, two portable radios and two LED light bars, Zelch said. That may not sound like much considering the grant is for more than $8,000, but police equipment is costly, he said.

The car radio costs about $2,100, the portable radios are roughly $1,600 each and the light bars are approximately $1,700 each, Zelch said. The new radios will be narrowband to comply with Federal Communications Commission rules that public safety agencies must switch from broadband to narrowband by the year 2013, Zelch explained. The new rules reflect the commission’s desire to improve spectrum efficiency in the crowded air space of broadband frequencies below 800 MHz. The goal is to move public safety agencies to narrower channels, and in the theory, multiply the number of available channels within the same amount of spectrum, according to an FCC document.

“There’s a movement in the police community to eliminate broadband radios and radios must go to narrowband,” Zelch said. “Everything has to be converted by 2013. We’re on par to meet that deadline because we’ve known this was coming. The FCC is mandating this.”

Zelch said narrowband radios will benefit law enforcement agencies. “It makes it so that we only hear us,” as opposed to picking up different stations on our frequency, he explained.

LED light bars for police cars also will be a plus, he said. The difference between the old light bars and the new ones? “You can actually see these,” Zelch said. “Even in foggy weather you can see them. They’re much brighter and they’re much more reliable. The old ones used to have a motor and a belt up inside them.”

Zelch said the police department plans to apply for the Local Law Enforcement Block Grant again next year.

(Jaime Baranyai can be reached at 860-NEWS or by e-mail at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it )