Vast Police Family Tied by Radio

The dispatcher acknowledged in a mumble that suggested only mild irritation. It’s a known fact that those assigned to a police communications unit are carefully screened to assure that they will sound as if they’ve been watching televised bowling tournaments for a month. Perhaps it’s the job, perhaps it’s the metallic squawk of the broadcast itself, but the speaking voice of the average police dispatcher falls somewhere between tedium and slow death. In Washington, at least, the world will not end with a bang but with the weary, distracted droning of a forty-seven-year-old D.C. Government employee who will ask a patrol unit for the location of that mushroom cloud and who will then assign the incident a six-digit incident number.

This is an excerpt from a story by Fred Reed in the Washington Times about that Washington, D.C.’s busy police communications center.

LISTEN to a police scanner at night and you enter a strange world of disembodied voices stretching across the city, a net linking scout cars and foot beats to each other and to those unsung public benefactors: the dispatchers at police headquarters.

“Man down at 14th and U, citizen says he’s bleeding . . . robbery in progress . . . domestic dispute, man beating a woman.”

All night it goes on. The voices of the dispatchers are dispassionate, efficient but not engaged. Whatever it is, they’ve heard it before. You can’t let this stuff get to you. You’ll go nuts. The voices of the cops responding out in the blackness are laconic, matter-of-fact. They, too, have seen it all. “Yeah, I’m on scene. Nobody here. Looks like they’ve left.”

The way it usually works is that a citizen calls 911, which is a bunch of consoles high in a District office building. The address of the calling telephone, down to the apartment number, comes up on the 911 operator’s console. The operator very quickly—I’ve watched and it is very quickly—gets the basic facts and pushes a button to squirt the information electronically to a dispatcher for the correct police district. There are seven such districts, referred to in the argot as 1-D, 2-D, and so on. Each police district has a specific frequency on the radio, so you can tune into, say, the 7th District and listen to Anacostia, then push a button and get Georgetown. You hear some crazy stuff.

Calm Routine

The dispatcher, calm, workaday: “Lady says there’s a naked man with a butcher knife in the alley.” I actually heard that one and it was a naked man, though it wasn’t a butcher knife. Guys get lit up on PCP, decide they’re too hot and strip.

Handling these calls is like being an air traffic controller. On a busy night the screens light up with robberies, shootings, stabbings, assaults, drug sales, burglaries, all that cheerful stuff. People curse the 911 ladies, yell for help, get mad when a car doesn’t come fast enough. Everyone wants help fast, but the dispatchers have to set priorities: Anything life-threatening and crimes in progress come first.

The strain is too much to allow eight-hour unbroken shifts. Back-ups take over periodically to give operators a break.

The current system is old and clunky, about fourteen years old actually, which is ancient in electronic terms. New gear and software will come on line in May, thanks to Police Chief Fred Thomas, and make life easier. It will be possible to attach cautionary notes to addresses in the database. This means that if a car is sent to a place on the 1100 block of X Street SW, the screen automatically warns dispatchers the place is a known crack house where shootings have occurred. From a cop’s point of view, this is worth knowing.

If you get a chance, listen to the net sometimes. It’s a funny feeling. In a scout car it sounds to me like a vast police family, a net of friendlies, as the military says, tied together by radio in a sea of naked guys with butcher knives. On and on it goes, night after night. Stolen cars and hot pursuit and shadows moving in alleys and lunatics on ledges. It never stops.