LASD Unit Breakdowns

[AnthonyM83]

Does anyone have a better list than what's available on the internet of the unit breakdowns for each station?

For example, I know Lennox station covers Lennox, Lawndale, Lomita/PalosVerdes/RollingHills, Marinda del Rey, Ladera, and I think Vermont and I heard mention of a "Central" area?

But sometimes I hear calls go out on Paramount Blvd or Norwalk Blvd...I'm assuming their addresses not actually in Paramount or Norwalk cities...but those are waaaay east...wouldn't they be assigned to East LA or stations?

Or I'll switch to Carson/Compton station (D9 channel), and hear dispatchers saying "Attention Palmdale Units" and dispatches a call...but Palmdale has their own channel...so...what's going on. It doesn't sound like a mutual aid or patch...

Any ideas?

Thanks for the help.

 

[SCPD]

I'm not entirely sure I understand you, but I will try to answer your question. There are 16 dispatch channels each consisting of a base frequency and a mobile frequency. On a permanent basis, 8 channels are set up to handle only one Sheriff's station and 7 of them handle two stations. This is determined by the workload of the various stations, with some stations having enough activity to need a dispatch channel of its own, while those with a lower call volume can share with another similar station. The Sheriff's communications center is capable of having 16 dispatchers working at 16 separate consoles at the same time. This would probably be the case during a period such as the evening shifts on Friday and Saturday when the workload is very heavy. During periods when the workload is lighter, such as the graveyard shift on a Wednesday, consoles are temporarily patched together so that one dispatcher is handling more than one dispatch channel.

As an example, on Friday night you might find a dispatcher at one console handling the radio traffic for units from the Lomita and Avalon stations on Dispatch 7 and another dispatcher working a console on Dispatch 12 for the Lennox and Marina Del Rey stations. During Wednesday's graveyard shift the call volume might be low enough that only one dispatcher is needed for all four stations so Dispatch 7 and 12 are tied together in the same console. So when a Lomita unit calls the dispatcher they do so on the mobile frequency of Dispatch 7. When the dispatcher answers, the reply can be heard simultaneously on the base frequencies of Dispatch 7 and 12. The beeping, indicating a mobile unit is transmitting, is heard on both 7 and 12 and is the result of a mobile unit transmitting on one of the mobile frequencies of either channel.

The field units do not need to know when the consoles are patched together as they are not asked to change channels. They don't know and don't need to keep track of what dispatcher is handling their traffic or what the volume of calls is in the dispatch center as they stay on the same dispatch channel as long as they are assigned to a particular station. The only way for them to know that the consoles are patched together is when they start hearing unit numbers from another station that is not permanently assigned to their dispatch channel. This is the same way that a scanner listener can tell if consoles are patched together.

 

[AnthonyM83]

That helps me a good deal. Thank you.

To clarify, when tying stations together, the dispatcher transmits on both channels simultaneously, but listens to both frequencies separately? So, to deputies on each channel, there is no increase in beeping from mobile units.

The only thing that confuses me about that is: When I hear both Compton and Norwalk calls going over Disp9 (Compton channel), I'll switch to Disp13 (actual Norwalk channel) and not hear anything...no dual broadcasting. Norwalk is just silent. Happened Saturday night (very busy...probably just low on dispatchers). If dispatch is only transmitting on 1 frequency, that means Norwalk units had to switch to Disp9? Or is the Norwalk frequency listed on RR just outdated?

I was also wondering if anyone had a further breakdown of car assignments, as that would help me learn what station channels cover what areas. I know Lennox does Marina, Lawndale, what else? Who does Vermont area... Lennox or Century station?

Since, I don't know all the streets in that area, I have to figure out if they're tying stations based on callsigns...but I don't quite know a lot of them.


Oh, and while we're on the topic, what's the reason for the beeping sound, rather than just hearing the transmission?

 

[jrholm]

Ex Smokey was close but not quite;


First here is a blist of how the call signs work:

http://www.radioreference.com/apps/db/?action=codes&code_id=1602


Now the number of dispatch channels exceedes the number of RTO's (sorry, PSD {they now like to be called public safety dispatchers over radio telephone operators}) on duty on an almost daily and shift basis. The allocation of the dispatch channels to the RTO's is controlled by a computer. Depending on how busy an individual RTO is the computer may assign additional dispatch channels or take some away. The individual RTO's may drop and pick up dispatch channels as they need/want to also. Say a unit wants to make a crime broadcast to multiple areas, he will simply ask the RTO to pick up those channels also before he begins his broadcast. One of the most popular ones is TSB (transit) a lot of units like them to get their broadcasts because those guys are every where. Also if a unit has emergent traffic the RTO will usually dump all her other channels so she can concentrate on the emergency at hand. You will sometimes hear emergent traffic say from Compton (disp 9) while listening to say Temple (disp 11). Then it will all go quiet, you may hear a new RTO say something like, "Temple your now clear". That lets the Temple units know their freq. is now clear for routine traffic. This could also explain why you heard Norwalk on a busy channel but when you switched over yourself there was nothing.

Now for assignments;

East Los Angeles covers the county area there and the City of Commerce

Lennox covers county areas called; Vermont, Central, and unincorp. Hawthorne as well as the City of Lawndale

Norwalk covers uninc. Whittier as well as the cities of Norwalk, La Mirada, and La Habra Heights

Temple covers uninc. areas of E. Pasadena, N. San Gabriel, S. San Gabriel, El Monte, MAD (Monrovia, Arcadia, Duarte) as well as the cities of Temple City, Rosemead, South El Monte, Duarte, and Bradbury

Santa Clarita covers a huge area including the entire north/west uninc. area of L.A. County all the way to Gorman as well as the city of Santa Clarita. They also have a boat assigned to Pyramid Lake.

Altadena is a very small area that covers only the uninc. area known as Altadena just north/west of Pasadena.

San Dimas covers uninc. areas of Azusa and Covina, the San Gabriel Mountains and the city of San Dimas

West Hollywood covers that city as well as Universal Studios and they maintain a sub station at Universal City Walk

Malibu is a part of Lost Hills Station although the Malibu units maintain the old 101 call signs.

Lancaster covers another huge chunk of the desert known as N. Los Angeles County as well as the city of Lancaster

Crescenta Valley covers the uninc. areas of Montrose and the west end of the San Gabriel mountains as well as the city of La Canada/Flintridge

Lakewood is almost all contract cities; Lakewood, Paramount, Hawaiian Gardens, Artesia and at one time included the N. End of Long Beach under a rather unique contract that is no more. They are also home to LASD's original air unit "skyknight" which you will still hear patrolling their skies.

Industry covers uninc. Hacienda Heights, Valinda, E. Valinda, as well as the cities of La Puente and City of Industry

Pico Rivera covers uninc. Whittier and the city of Pico Rivera

Carson covers that city and some smaller county areas they used to have huge uninc. tracts that were mainly taken over by Century and Compton.

Lomita covers the penninsula area where "Marineland" used to be, including all those cities except Palos Verdes Estates which has their own PD.

Avalon is Catalina Island they also maintain a responsibility for San Clemente Island but since the whole thing is a Navy base their is no need to routinely patrol that.

Century station combines the old Firestone and Lynwood Station areas. They have a huge chunk of county area going from Firestone Park to Willowbrook as well as the City of Lynwood.

Lost Hills Has the Calabasas, Agoura, Hidden Hills, and Malibu contracts as well as vast chunks of uninc. lands

Cerritos Station is funded by the city (it's good to be financially stable) and they are the sole responsibility of that station.

Palmdale, see Lancaster change the names of the cities and add a lot of 3 towed sloths

Marina Del Rey patrols Ladera Heights, View Park, Windsor Hills, Marina Del Rey (both land and water) they also maintain a patrol boat for the Santa Monica Bay and beyond

Compton has that city as well as the uninc. areas of Rosewood, East Rancho Dominguez, and Gardena

Walnut also has Diamond Bar and the uninc. area of Rowland Heights

 

[jrholm]

Also the beeps aka "the busy tone" is a bit of LASD history and dates back to when their were only 4 dispatch channels for the entire county! It's to keep the field units from tying up vital air time with car to car transmissions, that's what the L-Tac channels are for. Field units can also talk "direct" if your close enough you will sometimes hear them on the dispatch channels. In an emergent situation the field units can also ask for "the patch" which drops 'the busy tone".

LASD also dispatches a little different. But it actually works really well and allows LASD to maintain response times that are amazingly low for such a large agency. When you place a call for service with LASD via regular phone lines or 9-1-1 your call goes directly to your local sheriff's station. A routine call for service will usually never even hit the radio room at SCC. It's entered by a call taker at the local station. The actual dispatcher is at the station also. When the call is entered into CAD it goes to the dispatcher who then assigns it to a local car. If it's a routine call it goes directly from the station cad system to the car in the field via MDT and is not voiced. The only time a routine call is voiced is when the assigned unit does not have a MDT (motor or footbeat) or if the car has asked for his calls to be voiced (like if he is going to be out of the car a while). A priority call will also go to the SCC radio room where an RTO will voice the call also, once the station dispatcher has assigned cars to the call. An emergent call will go the SCC radio room at the same time the call is entered into CAD. The RTO will immediately start to bid the call out searching for the closest unit. Then the station dispatcher will assign the call.

LASD has strong protocols to maintain response times of under 1 hour for routine calls, under 20 minutes for priority calls, and immediate service for emergent calls. If deputies do not meet the requierd times they are required to justify their delay to the bosses.

 

[jlanfn]

Maps of each station's patrol coverage areas at:

http://www.lasd.org/sites/yir9600/yir2007/contents.htm

 

[SCPD]

Thank you jlanfn for all the helpful information. Normally I would not answer a question such as the one AnthonyM83 posed as it is an agency that I don't have a working knowledge of, and Avenue A is almost 300 miles from home. I answered him because no one else seemed to be answering him at the time and I did the best I could with what I remembered from other threads and my experience monitoring the LASO during visits south.

During my Forest Service career I worked several fires on the Angeles National Forest where LASO deputies were providing traffic control and conducting evacuations, but on each occasion I was busy enough with my crew and the fire to the point all I could do is wave as I passed them. Normally on a long fire assignment you have enough slack time at various periods to be able to talk with people from many different agencies, but the LASO was not one of those agencies,. They were always on the perimeter and I never saw them in fire camp. L.A. County Fire was a different matter as I spent a fair amount of time looking at and being given a tour of many of their apparatus, most especially their batt chief rigs. You tend to get a lot of good information during those times, depending on how curious you were about other agencies. I thought it was as valuable as some of the formal training I attended.

When you mentioned the LASO having only 4 dispatch channels at one time it brought back memories of the sun spot maximum of around 1980. I was living in New Mexico at the time and used to pick up the LASO at night. I always knew what part of the country the skip was coming from when I heard the the beeps and the fastest talking dispatchers you would ever hear anywhere. They spoke so fast they could have given Chick Hern a run for his money!

Thanks again for your excellent posts. I'm sure you answered AnthonyM83's questions. I now have a few more pages in the radio system information notebook I carry with me when I travel.

 

[imerik]

re: how the lasd callsigns work

the link below that jrholm listed previously doesn't work. is it a typo or does the information no longer exist. when i click on it, rr says it's the wrong code.

RadioReference.com - Scanner Frequencies and Radio Frequency Reference

 

[imerik]

it was this code, not the one listed in my previous post. dunno what happened there

RadioReference.com - Scanner Frequencies and Radio Frequency Reference

 

[imerik]

ugh, nm...rr won't let me re-post the link from jrholm. it's the one dated 6/2008 about the unit identifiers. anyone have updated info?

 

[E5911]

OK I get the system, now for the 64 thounsand dollar question. If all 9-1-1 are screened at the local station, and each local station has a disptacher, then what is the job of the SCC? I would assume it would be picking up over flow 9-1-1, failures and the like, SEB etc.

Not having been there I thought the SCC would be this huge palce that dispatched for everyone.
Also, with each station doing thier own thing, how is coodination acomplished with Fire Depts and othe LE agencies, must be a pain to figure out whom to call.

 

[jrholm]

SCC does communications (radio/mdc/mdt etc). If a field unit requests fire, SCC processes it. If the call taker at the station sees that fire is needed on a call pre-response, they forward the call to fire. SCC does not take 911 calls. They do however maintain an alarm station. When ever a monitoring company calls in an alarm in sheriff's area they call SCC who then creates the call and forwards to the appropriate station. That way alarm companies can have a "one size fits all" phone number.

SCC also becomes huge when you start talking about multi station or agency responses or disasters. They can patch sheriff radio channels with CHP, LAPD, and numerous other agencies, even LACoFD. They monitor the use of tactical and mutual aid channels and assign them to incidents on an as needed basis.

My original posts were really just the tip of the iceberg as to how LASD comms work. It's something that would actually take 6 months of doing and teaching for even a basic working understanding and years to actually master.

 

[scottyhetzel]

Just more info. On patrol area

Ex Smokey was close but not quite;


First here is a blist of how the call signs work:

RadioReference.com - Scanner Frequencies and Radio Frequency Reference Database


Now the number of dispatch channels exceedes the number of RTO's (sorry, PSD {they now like to be called public safety dispatchers over radio telephone operators}) on duty on an almost daily and shift basis. The allocation of the dispatch channels to the RTO's is controlled by a computer. Depending on how busy an individual RTO is the computer may assign additional dispatch channels or take some away. The individual RTO's may drop and pick up dispatch channels as they need/want to also. Say a unit wants to make a crime broadcast to multiple areas, he will simply ask the RTO to pick up those channels also before he begins his broadcast. One of the most popular ones is TSB (transit) a lot of units like them to get their broadcasts because those guys are every where. Also if a unit has emergent traffic the RTO will usually dump all her other channels so she can concentrate on the emergency at hand. You will sometimes hear emergent traffic say from Compton (disp 9) while listening to say Temple (disp 11). Then it will all go quiet, you may hear a new RTO say something like, "Temple your now clear". That lets the Temple units know their freq. is now clear for routine traffic. This could also explain why you heard Norwalk on a busy channel but when you switched over yourself there was nothing.

Now for assignments;

East Los Angeles covers the county area there and the City of Commerce

Lennox covers county areas called; Vermont, Central, and unincorp. Hawthorne as well as the City of Lawndale

Norwalk covers uninc. Whittier as well as the cities of Norwalk, La Mirada, and La Habra Heights

Temple covers uninc. areas of E. Pasadena, N. San Gabriel, S. San Gabriel, El Monte, MAD (Monrovia, Arcadia, Duarte) as well as the cities of Temple City, Rosemead, South El Monte, Duarte, and

Santa Clarita covers a huge area including the entire north/west uninc. area of L.A. County all the way to Gorman as well as the city of Santa Clarita. They also have a boat assigned to Pyramid Lake.

Altadena is a very small area that covers only the uninc. area known as Altadena just north/west of Pasadena.

San Dimas covers uninc. areas of Azusa and Covina, the San Gabriel Mountains and the city of San Dimas

West Hollywood covers that city as well as Universal Studios and they maintain a sub station at Universal City Walk

Malibu is a part of Lost Hills Station although the Malibu units maintain the old 101 call signs.

Lancaster covers another huge chunk of the desert known as N. Los Angeles County as well as the city of Lancaster

Crescenta Valley covers the uninc. areas of Montrose and the west end of the San Gabriel mountains as well as the city of La Canada/Flintridge

Lakewood is almost all contract cities; Lakewood, Paramount, Hawaiian Gardens, Artesia and at one time included the N. End of Long Beach under a rather unique contract that is no more. They are also home to LASD's original air unit "skyknight" which you will still hear patrolling their skies.

Industry covers uninc. Hacienda Heights, Valinda, E. Valinda, as well as the cities of La Puente and

Pico Rivera covers uninc. Whittier and the city of Pico Rivera

Carson covers that city and some smaller county areas they used to have huge uninc. tracts that were mainly taken over by Century and Compton.

Lomita covers the penninsula area where "Marineland" used to be, including all those cities except Palos Verdes Estates which has their own PD.

Avalon is Catalina Island they also maintain a responsibility for San Clemente Island but since the whole thing is a Navy base their is no need to routinely patrol that.

Century station combines the old Firestone and Lynwood Station areas. They have a huge chunk of county area going from Firestone Park to Willowbrook as well as the City of Lynwood.

Lost Hills Has the Calabasas, Agoura, Hidden Hills, and Malibu contracts as well as vast chunks of uninc. lands

Cerritos Station is funded by the city (it's good to be financially stable) and they are the sole responsibility of that station.

Palmdale, see Lancaster change the names of the cities and add a lot of 3 towed sloths

Marina Del Rey patrols Ladera Heights, View Park, Windsor Hills, Marina Del Rey (both land and water) they also maintain a patrol boat for the Santa Monica Bay and beyond

Compton has that city as well as the uninc. areas of Rosewood, East Rancho Dominguez, and Gardena

Walnut also has Diamond Bar and the uninc. area of Rowland Heights

Industry station : Bassett area, and la Habra. Heights

Temple station: legg lake ( south San Gabriel area) and chantry flats park and road ( above Arcadia)

 

[Code20Photog]

Industry station : Bassett area, and la Habra. Heights

Temple station: legg lake ( south San Gabriel area) and chantry flats park and road ( above Arcadia)

East LA also covers Cudahy.

 

[scottyhetzel]

Code 20 ,

Is there one more super small city that E. LA handles ? Vernon ? Bell ?

 

[Code20Photog]

Code 20 ,

Is there one more super small city that E. LA handles ? Vernon ? Bell ?

Yes, Maywood. All the other small cities there have their own police departments.

Maywood fun fact: The population density is over 23,000 people per square mile. Yowzers.

 

[scottyhetzel]

Nice work...

Yes, Maywood. All the other small cities there have their own police departments.

Maywood fun fact: The population density is over 23,000 people per square mile. Yowzers.

Yikes....23 k ? Serious ? Wow. What is the unit I.d.s for maywood and cudahy ? also how many units per contract city ? I won't push.lol

 

[dgower]

Regarding LASD Unit breakdowns..

I believe they break down about as much as units from other agencies. The crown victoria is a good vehicle but it can only take so much.

 

[scottyhetzel]

Dgower ,

You are off topic just a bit. Lol

 

[scottyhetzel]

Cudahey and maywood units

Cudahey. 26 xunits

Maywood 28 x units


I found this on another tread....so I answered my own question.