Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Early days... DISPATCHING!


As I crawled out of my pit at 5am, rubbing my eyes, I knew it was gonna be one of those days. I had checked the duties the shift before and seen I was dispatching to one of the busier areas as usual, GREAT!
So I get into work and we do the hand over, he tells me there is a missing from home that is ongoing, and also the nightshift carried out an arrest warrant, but ended up finding a house full of cannabis, which was ongoing in the morning.
Anyway, there were 5 jobs sitting on my list, MFH, the warrant and other usual rubbish. I checked the deferred list... right... now i have 19 jobs on my list, and its not even 7am.
The Sgt rings me up with todays duties, i had 2 panda's on and a tutor unit. One of the panda had ongoing enquiries, so i was down to one... turns out they were over the other side of the county doing something else which they didnt tell me about. So, I had to get my tutor unit to deal with all of these jobs as best I could. To be fair, they did excellent, and couldn't of asked more her.
My gripe is going back to this deferred list... there had been a job put out 4 days prior about a hit and run accident and no one had attended, there was a line on that a certain officer was aware... but after that nothing, and for some reason one of the other dispatchers had just deferred it until he was next on duty 4 days later... so I shout him up trying to get a sequel... this is when he tells me he never got around to it that day, and had told the dispatcher to pass it over to the next shift. The point i'm making is, why are people so lazy that he couldnt be even bothered to ring this lady and ask her if anyone has been around to see her, instead he deferred it for 4 days! This is shocking, we found out who had done it and I told my supervision, and I hope he gets bollocked for it!
Anyway, we are getting through the jobs as best we can and I look up and my bait is in 10 minutes, excellent! My list is down to 16. My bait relief comes and lets me get away. So off i go to the gym with my mate for an hour. I get back to take over... and... whats this shit?! MY list has rocketed to 22! Well never mind! it's not long until I go home. So crack on and get a few more jobs done. Then my only available unit goes for their bait... so I have no one, all of my pandas are either tied up or state 4. I manage to get one of them available again for my last hour adn get 2 more jobs done, end up handing over 20 jobs to the back shift. Which isn't bad considering I only had one panda for 90% of the shift!
My point is here... lazy bastards! How do they get away with it?! I work my bollocks off, and these arses come along, do nothing and get away with it, but if I even take 10 minutes to take a break I get bollocked!

4 Comments:

Blogger DogsBody said...

Don't you just hate earlies?!
Hopefully the lazy bastards will get whats coming to them - you never know they may get put on dispatching the busiest section you've got on a Friday/Saturday night turn, that'll make em work!

I like your writing style, keep the posts coming - i've added you to my sidebar

16 May 2006 at 14:47  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

You, think you'rs hard donr by.
You sit in your, probably air conditioned, department, with all your only goal to clear your screens so you can go home happy that you've shovelled more shit than anybody else.

I think you need to look a little out of the window, beyond the screen in front of you and the end of your nose.

There you will see officers like myself working our nuts off for decent members of the public and trying to wade through the other crap that you lot send us to without attempting another option, like "resolution without deployment of officers".

Most of the time you have no other officers is due to them being generally browned off with the relentless influx of jobs without having time for their own enquires for jobs that they were sent to by you in the first place.

So we like other officers develop selective hearing.
Thus if it's a genuine grade 1 or an officer needing assistance, we will be en-route, but if it's Tom Brown having anoher argument with his neighbour about parking, we are all stat 8.

Sorry but you write like you are new to the job, thus if you are, welcome to one of the most thankless tasking in the police community.
I hope you are better than our comms ops, if you are, you will soon be noticed as such and officers will ty to bend over backwards for you.
If you're shite, your officers will know in the space of 3 weeks and will not do a dot for you.
Ta ta.

17 May 2006 at 18:48  
Blogger CommsOperator said...

DogsBody,
Thanks for your kind words... I have been here 2 years, and nothing seems to be getting done, supervision say... we are aware of it! Yeah the thing is they are not dispatchers... just call handlers.
Hey ho... life goes on, and I take pride in my work... unlike others.


Anonymous,
I work very hard at my job and have done for two years now. Every job my officers go to, I give them as much details as possible, I offcer PNC checks, I offer previous log search, Intel checks the lot, anything to help.
I try to avoid sending them to crap jobs, if it can be referred to the beat team it will.
You have to remember, some areas are busier than others... and Tom Brown arguing with his neighbour may be the only job for that area, so they will go to it!
I watch Street Crime UK and see all these officers for different forces on a friday and saturday night... now if I had that many resources my my town center we'd be laughing!
I dont know what you are getting at? When you have got many officers at the end of a shift shouting up giving sequels, you've got 999 ringing, you've got immediate responses coming in, whilst also trying to do a handover... yeah cops outside have things to deal with... but one thing at a time... we have things to do... muliple things... keeping track whos gone where, do i have to divert them, whos not available due to prinsoners... trying working in comms... that might get you off your high horse :)
TA TA!

23 May 2006 at 01:14  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Comms Operator,
I totally agree with your comments. Unless people have spent several years in a control room (Annonymous??) then they have no idea of the strain you are under. Officers on the streets do an excellent job (i'm now one of them) but controllers do an excellent job too. Except it's much harder as there are multiple incidents to deal with and know what's happening with. I used to work in a busy city centre control room for 5 years and I am still getting used to dealing with one job at a time while out and about! So, Annonymous, back off and have a bit of patience with controllers, eh?? My officers were as good as gold and were regularly heard to say 'there's no way I could do this job' when sitting next to me! And my control room wasn't air conditioned either, the officers used to be sweating buckets when they came in to see us, asking how we coped in there every day! TTFN :-)

16 August 2006 at 08:16  

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