Thread: Civillian Dispatchers

I never really ran into that problem. Most of the officers I've worked with have always been cool. If anything, they gave dispatchers credit for handling some very stupid calls.
I DO hate when people (I dont mean police.. I've only had this problem with on-call fire) want to talk on the radio just for the sake of talking on the radio. With the phone ringing, 911, etc., it's annoying to have to copy everything they say on top of everything else going on (some people don't get the point of incident command). I think a lot of people do not realize that dispatching is more than answering a phone..

We usually have two civilians and one cop inside. There has to be a minimum of one PO contractually, and on sundays, because both of the civilians on my shift for instance are off,there are three PO's inside. ON mids, five days a week one civilian and one cop, two cops when the civilian is on her days off. Also, the civilians get all of the Holidays off.

While I did just post my frustrations about some of the stuff that goes on in dispatch, I think our civilians for the most part are great. As with every job, not every one has the ability to do a job that they are getting paid for. But even those civilians that I am talking about, are slowly getting better (It just shouldn't take three years.) I blame a lot of it on on our admin. They used to have the civilians systematically go out on the road with a PO every so often, so that they can get a first hand exposure to what we do, and why we ask them to do certain things for us. It was working well fora while,and then the admin. had stopped it for some unknown reason.

We have civilians. Like everyone else, some are squared away and some suck ass. I think we should have a sergeant or above inside monitoring the shit being dispatched because there's way too much dumbshit being sent out. We also had them do ride-alongs. Good idea in theory but I don't think most (cops or dispatchers) gave a crap or tried. Probably due to apathy knowing nothing would change. And nothing has...

we have civilian dispatchers only and i havent run into that problem either. alot of them joke about it but in the end the ones who weren't dispatchers say they could never do that job. where i work there have been alot of past dispatchers who were hired as officers so they know how it is and some even run their own stuff

Originally Posted by Jaycee

we have civilian dispatchers only and i havent run into that problem either. alot of them joke about it but in the end the ones who weren't dispatchers say they could never do that job. where i work there have been alot of past dispatchers who were hired as officers so they know how it is and some even run their own stuff

You would never get any Sh*t from my wife, Jaycee. She used to be a dispatcher after all.

Guys that give me shit get it right back...
I don't have time or patience for their egos. 99.99% are fantastic to work with anyway - EVEN many of the ones that were very anti civilian in the beginning.

The most crap I get is from other dispatchers from one certain troop... but they don't dare make an actual formal complaint!

The worst thing my department ever did was allow civilians on the radio. The old system had civilians answering the phones, while a police officer dispatched the calls. It was a great system that worked fine, so of course it had to be tossed into the garbage heap. Now, dispatch is a clusterfuck of 6+ people trying to do the same thing at the same time on the radio, with predictable results. I've lost count of how many times I've been dispatched to the same call 2-3-4 times in a row by different people who are sitting next to each other, while at the same time I've been screaming for help while those same people were either assuming someone else is listening to the radio, or they were all outside smoking cigarettes.

Some of our civilian dispatchers are great, some are going to get someone killed, and some fall somewhere in the middle. My opinion is to assign one or two people to handle the radio. That's your job, so don't even think about assuming someone else is doing it, and you're not going outside for a 30-minute smoke break. Everyone else answers the phones, and sends the calls to you for dispatch. Know your job, and do it.

We have a regional dispatch that is run by the sheriff. All civilians. For the most part they are good

We have 2-3 civilians dispatching. 1 is always on fire and when there is 3 we have 2 on police. One of which is like a back up. If it gets too busy then the 3rd person kinda jumps in. Works very well. The only time the officers give us crap is when it takes a second call to dispatch for us to hear them. And that is usually due to the fact that they are not talking into the mic, they are not hearing us respond to their first call, or their are a couple of guys in dispatch that are talking louder than they should be.