You asked for it, DPD1
Harry, since you've obviously listened to other departments as well... How would you say LAPD ranks in comms compared to others?
I'm terribly biased of course, with my wife and I having worked LAPD Communications for 40+ years combined, but overall I think they do a very good job for such a large city. As I know I've mentioned before, after LAPD I worked for South Bay Regional Comms (then in Redondo Beach with 7 PDs and 7 FDs) and then for little Grass Valley PD up north, who had a total of 11 officers. So from the biggest to one of the smallest dispatch centers in the state. LAPD's dispatching was far better squared away than either of those. But then, they'd been doing it for decades longer.
Anyway, it's not really a communications issue, but probably the biggest problem is simply not having nearly enough officers in the field to dispatch the calls to. When it's busy, a unit may have up to five (non-priority) calls in its "stack." If you're caller #5 you may be waiting hours for them to show up, and if you're the RTO, you've pretty much lost that unit for a good part of the shift... except they can be "re-toned" for a priority call if needed; but then all their still-pending calls get delayed even longer, or else dumped back into the division's queue. Very frustrating at both ends.
I was tempted to compare LAPD communications with other similar-sized departments like LASD and CHP, but it's like apples and oranges. Over the years every department establishes procedures for handling calls (not just the radio part) based on their overall policies and priorities and "way of doing business." What works well at LAPD Communications wouldn't at all fit into LASD's ways of doing things, or CHP's, and vice versa.
The terminology thing just happens to hit a nerve with me since it's become pretty loose compared to the tightly-prescribed word-for-word terminology and "basic operating procedures" that were drilled into us, and enforced (for the RTOs, but seldom for the officers) in the 60s, 70s, and early 80s. But that's really a minor personal irritation rather than a problem for them... the dispatchers and officers seem to understand what each other are saying even if it's less formal and rigid than in the past.
They've got a terrific system, technically, which is very flexible to immediately meet changing needs, e.g. more than enough all-purpose consoles at the two dispatch centers which can be reconfigured on-the-fly if, for instance they suddenly need more radio operators or more call-takers, and maybe except for an extreme emergency that may some day happen, they've got plenty of radio frequencies.
The two biggest shortcomings, in my opinion, have to do first with a bizarre equipment issue, and then a specific procedure that's been handed down from "upstairs" - (Comm Div itself can make only minor tweaks in how calls are processed, or internal stuff like where people sit, break schedules, etc).
The unfathomable, to me, equipment "feature," which arose when they moved into the new dispatch centers in 2002 and 2003, is that the radio dispatcher (RTO) can no longer hear his/her units' transmissions whenever another operator is broadcasting on her frequency - which happens a LOT as any regular listener knows. There's apparently some arcane technical reason for this, but to me and most of the people actually working there, it's a huge officer-safety issue. And it's not a matter of "push-to-talk, release to listen" as in the units' radios. The RTO's incoming audio is from the UPLINK frequency (e.g. 509.7375 for Central Div), and the outgoing broadcast goes via the DOWNLINK side (506.7375), so they're not sharing or crossing paths. When the new consoles were installed in 2002, they were told that the vendor (whom I won't name, but their initials are Motorola), simply "couldn't" set it up the way it had been done ever since LAPD went two-way in the 1930s, where the operator could ALWAYS hear her units whether she or any other RTO was broadcasting. If I were still working there I probably would have been fired by now, as it's something I would have grabbed onto like a bulldog and never let go of. And I'm a really, really laid-back guy. Rumor a while back was that the vendor might try again to fix this back to pre-2002 "side-tone" and "mute" capabilities, but nothing's happened yet, as far as I know.
The other thing in my opinion, a procedure that ties directly into that equipment fiasco, is the overuse of multicasting so many questionably-appropriate (again IMHO) calls on so many frequencies. This has a long history, and one specific incident has probably guaranteed that a fair amount of it will continue forever, but I think it's way overdone. To use my earlier comparison, LAPD is quite different from LASD and CHP, in that all of LAPD's divisions are geographically right up against each other and share miles of common borders (see pdf at
http://lapdonline.org/home/pdf_view/40022 ). It makes sense to broadcast most urgent life/property threat calls on adjacent divisions' frequencies, in the not-uncommon event that they may have a unit right on top of a borderline call. But the impression I've gotten over the past few years is that the pre-selects are often entirely overdone for many call-types. This is directly related to the officer-safety issue above, in that
the RTO for a division becomes quite literally "deaf" to all her units whenever any other operator is transmitting on his/her frequency. When it's busy, there are often multiple back-to-back hotshot calls going out over any given frequency, rendering those officers' radios totally useless for as much as several minutes if they have an urgent - or even routine - message to transmit. Their only option is to hit their "Emergency/help" trigger, which most coppers aren't inclined to do unless the stuff is really hitting the blades and they need help like they never needed it before. Or I suppose they could go back to their car and type in what they need :roll:
LAPD's PSRs are, in the main, very good at what they do, despite those drawbacks and their new CAD system,
"Premier", which went online in 2007, and is commonly described as being clumsy, apparently requiring longer or more complex commands to do many routine tasks. Getting hired is a very tough hurtle to begin with, between the application process (including a "do you REALLY know what you're getting yourself into" form, similar to
this one from 2002, but probably revised somewhat since then, then testing, and the background check.
Now the following training info is all at least four years old, but I suspect it's not terribly different today. AFAIK there are a couple current and/or retired PSRs or Comms-knowledgeable police ofcrs who drop in here occasionally, and hopefully they'll set me straight on any errors or changes, but...
The last I heard, training began with six weeks of classroom for orientation, protocols, procedures and radio-position simulation; this was followed by 18-20 weeks working radio positions one-on-one with an instructor, then two weeks by yourself on the radio but with the instructor monitoring you from a "mirror" console and able to step in immediately if necessary. You either made the cut, got up-to-speed with some intense tutoring, or got dropped. After you pass that, there came a couple more weeks of classroom again, this time for the call-taker positions, again followed by one-on-one with an instructor on 9-1-1 and non-emergency-line phone consoles.
Once you get through all that you're cut loose on your own, and rotate daily between the various positions (to keep your radio, phone and other skills sharp and current). I believe the probationary period for PSRs is 18 months, including the training phases, (or else it's 12 month AFTER you finish the training, but I think it's just the straight 18 months). Figures I've seen in the past indicated that it's about twice as hard, statistically, to get hired and complete probation as a PSR as it is to make it as a police officer. Sounds about right; in the 60s/70's our washout rate for new-hires was about 2/3, and that was before any of this formal training and high-tech equipment came along.
Class dismissed. Hey... wake up, you there in the back!
