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Public Safety Director Barry Fritz hopes to tell the story of Richfield's finest with a collection of historical photos.

As Barry Fritz brings the first of dozens of black-and-white photos of very serious-looking Richfield cops onto his computer screen, the opening bars of Mike Post’s Hill Street Blues theme song come up, too.

“What else would you use?” he asks.

Good question.

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The ‘80s TV series about a police precinct in a gritty American city was shot in a near-documentary style that tried to give viewers a sense of what police work is really like, so in that sense the images on Fritz’s computer fit the theme. Photos of the first Richfield constable at work, the first woman police officer, a group practicing at a firing range and ‘50s police cars lined up outside the old police station appear one after the other on the screen.

But while “Hill Street” was a police drama with story lines designed to keep audiences tuning in to NBC Thursday night after Thursday night, the collection of photos Richfield Public Safety Director Fritz has gathered over the past several years has more the feel of a historical society exhibit.

“Throughout my tenure here,” he said, “I’ve had access to all data and all files, and I’d come across pictures when we’d be doing purges of records. It occurred to me that no one had really kept a record, or pictorial record at least, of this department’s history. There was nothing that was in any one particular place or area that you could go to and see old photos, see pictures of other officers and things like that.

“And I thought, ‘You know, when I’m gone, if I don’t do something about it, it’s not going to get done.’ Our past is who we are today…It’s formed the basis for this department.”

So Fritz began to collect photos, portraits, badges and other artifacts with the idea of preserving some of the department’s past. It turns out he wasn’t the only one interested in what he found.

“I’ve got police officers that have walked into my office and seen these pictures and they don’t know any of these guys. And they think it’s the coolest thing ever.” Fritz said. “They just love it. They’re interested in it because it’s where we came from. It’s our history.”

“I’m a case in point,” he continued. “I can look at pictures and I can tell you—even though I never met them, I’ve never even heard their names—just about every officer that ever worked here. And it’s really been fun.”

Chief Fritz plans to collect the photos into a slideshow that will be burned onto a DVD. Because he’s collected hundreds of photos and documents, they won’t all fit into the slideshow, but he wants to put everything he’s collected onto the DVD.

He would like to include at least one photo, badge number and dates of service for every officer who served in the department from its creation in 1938 through 1974, when the city created its Public Safety Department.

“Going back (to) the older days, there were commercial photographers that ran around to crime scenes, and they had large-format cameras, and the departments hired them to take pictures of muster and inspections,” Fritz said, explaining why he is limiting the project’s scope. When the city stopped hiring professional photographers, the visual record of the department all but stopped, too.

“I don’t have much of the later ‘60s and ‘70s besides just photo IDs of the officers. So it’s going to be more, if you will, ancient history,” he said.

Fritz also plans to include a short written history of the department on the DVD, and a video walking tour of the current department offices, which will come down with the rest of City Hall when the city’s new public service building is finished.

He would like to donate a copy of the DVD to the Richfield Historical Society and give discs to family members of former officers.

Part of the project will be a tribute to Fred Babcock, the only Richfield police officer killed in the line of duty. Babcock was slain in June of 1949 while responding to burglary call at a local grocery.

“I’ve got the original reports scanned in, the investigation from his shooting, his application from when he started here,” Fritz said. The story was carried in national crime magazines of the time because the men who shot Babcock were the target of a multi-state manhunt.

So while the project won’t be Hill Street Blues, it will have some genuine historical drama from Richfield’s past.

Note: Chief Fritz is looking for more photos of officers and images of the original police department building. If you have some you’d like to contribute, email him: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . 

Images courtesy Barry Fritz

This story originally appeared Sept. 23, 2010.