Radio Ham

This is going to be an attempt to write a blog about my job as a Police Dispatcher. I make no claims to being a good writer, and I don't have a great deal of time to spend doing this sort of thing, so most of my posts will be pretty much written on the hoof and liable to be error strewn, but hopefully readers, if there are any readers, will get a gist of what I do at work all day.

And what do I do? Primarily I allocate Police Officers to incidents over a radio channel (or talkgroup as they are now called since the introduction of AirWaves digital radios). At its simplist this is probably the easiest job in the world; an incident is reported to the police, it is passed to me and I find who is the nearest suitable officer to deal. I allocate the job to the officer over the radio, he or she accepts the job and I record the fact on the incident log. Once the incident has been dealt with I record the result on the incident log, close that job, and allocate the officer to a new incident. Simple.

The reality is often quite different. The area I usually cover, an urban area covering 5 medium sized towns, will often have an average of 60 outstanding incidents for allocation at any one time. Some of these can be days and weeks old as we have been unable to attend in that time. I will usually have 1 van and perhaps 4 cars to deal with these 60 jobs during a shift; in an average shift we can expect to receive a further 40-100 incidents to deal with, many of which can be Grade 1 Immediate response emergencies where there is considered an imminent threat to life and/or property, and of course these take precedence over all other incidents, including the week old reports that I will have inherited at the start of my shift. If you have ever waited days to see an officer after reporting something, then this is why.

As a result, in practice the job is far from simple; I am continually reviewing the outstanding incidents that need allocating, reading the new incidents that have just been switched to me, and assisting the officers outside who are dealing with incidents and need enquiries doing. It can call for split second decision making while trying to do five things at once and it can be stressful; but when you feel you have done a good job and handled a tricky situation well it can be very rewarding. Unfortunately, many days I leave work disheartened at the poor service I feel we have provided the public who deserve better, due largely to the sheer lack of frontline officers I have at my disposal to attend incidents. That said, I think the good outweighs the bad, and as things stand I am not looking for another job, so that must say something.

That is all I will say for now; as the days go by I will talk at more length about what my job entails. Feel free to leave any comments for me, and I will write another post soon.