{"id":1167,"date":"2012-04-06T12:43:22","date_gmt":"2012-04-06T16:43:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thinblueflorida.com\/?p=1167"},"modified":"2013-04-11T23:58:59","modified_gmt":"2013-04-12T03:58:59","slug":"officer-safety-assumptions-and-the-dispatch-center","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thinblueflorida.com\/?p=1167","title":{"rendered":"Officer Safety Assumptions and the Dispatch Center"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I was bright and shiny and a little scared on my first shift in a real police car during field training.\u00a0 After loading up, my FTO and I were buckled up in the cruiser in the PD parking lot.\u00a0 He leaned over and prepared to say something.\u00a0 I thought, Remember this, it could save my life!\u00a0 Dryly, he said, \u201c And don\u2019t take any sh*t from the dispatchers\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

I think cops expect too much from the information provided them by the radio.\u00a0 Have you ever heard a frustrated officer interrogate a telecommunicator for more details the operator obviously does not have?\u00a0\u00a0 It is a waste of radio time.\u00a0 Just go to the call.<\/p>\n

Stand in your Communications Center some time and listen to a call taker trying to extract useful information from a person on the other end of the line who is either (Pick one. Hell, pick two):\u00a0 drunk, hysterical, delusional, confrontational, over-medicated, disinterested, self-righteous, or just plain stupid.\u00a0 The exchange would be comical if the things that person had to say were not, at times, critical to our safety.<\/p>\n

Telecommunicators receive every shred of information about an incident through a telephone or radio.\u00a0 They have no actual observation of the incident.\u00a0 Dispatchers act as a conduit between a scene and the police officer, but they have no way of collecting intelligence except through verbal interaction.<\/p>\n

Where this impacts officer safety is in the danger of officers believing and acting upon the second-, third-, and maybe fourth-hand information given over a radio channel by a dispatcher.\u00a0 I have heard officers, and some veteran ones, complain that they arrived at call that was nothing like the dispatch.\u00a0 Right!\u00a0 And why did you expect it would be?<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s make some positive assumptions for our own good:<\/p>\n