The communicators

In their brand new high-tech facility in Carrington St, police communications operators find their work in no way mundane. But just how common are misconceptions about the operators’ role?

Suddenly, out of the dead of night, comes a desperate urgent-assist call to the police communications centre in Adelaide. A radio operator hears a young patrol officer bellow: “High-speed!”

Unruffled, and in a calm voice, the seasoned operator responds instantly. She asks the pursuing patrol for its location. But neither officer in the patrol car hears her call. The passenger again yells: “High-speed, high-speed!”

And, again, the operator asks a location of the patrol. This time, an ominous silence follows her request. Beneath her confident exterior, she comes to feel some concern.

Finally, after a tense 30 seconds, the silence breaks. She hears her front-line colleague shout an excited response, against a background of blaring sirens and screeching tyres.

Amid the commotion, however, his quickly spoken words are impossible to make out. She urges him to repeat. But another seconds-long silence follows, and tension builds among the operator and her team-mates.

She fears for the officers’ safety. Have they crashed, she wonders, or, worse, have some fleeing, drug-crazed criminals fired upon them?

Then, in strained voice, comes another transmission from the young patrol officer. He manages to blurt out his location, and the high speed the chase has reached. A rapid succession of short transmissions with only sketchy details follows.

A senior sergeant and the state duty officer become aware of the action. They move toward the operator’s dispatch booth, where they stand either side of her. The SDO is poised to make the unpopular decision to terminate the chase.

Meanwhile, the exchange of dialogue remains near impossible. But the operator manages to hear the patrolman say that in the escape car are two armed offenders who have just held up an all-night service station.

The officer then shrieks: “They’re throwing missiles at us! We’ve taken some direct hits! We need back-up.”

A “mapper” rushes in to help the operator who, with scant information, tracks the offender and continues to talk to the officer calling the chase. She also calls on other patrols with which she co-ordinates support for the pursuit car.

With the help of her colleagues, the operator goes on to direct a 14-and-half-minute chase before the offenders dump their stolen car in an outer-suburban street. They flee on foot, but supporting patrols catch and arrest them in a nearby paddock.

The scenario is common. It could be any one of the 1,300-plus jobs that communications centre operators deal with every day of the year. But, for those operators, just how tough are such jobs to handle?

“The initial part of a high-speed chase can be quite stressful,” says team leader, Senior Constable Paul Quee, who moved to communications in 1999. “After you’ve had a high-speed, or a patrol stumble into a hold-up, it gets the heart pumping. The old hands start shaking sometimes, because it’s just a huge adrenaline rush.

“The first three to four minutes is the most chaotic. It causes a bit of mayhem for a short while – organized mayhem – but it certainly gets the pulse rate going when people are suddenly yelling at you.

“Everything’s so fast. The dispatcher’s trying to put information onto a computer screen, on which they can only type one command at a time. If you’re not careful, and you don’t keep control of your radio channel – or talk group, as it’s called now – things will get on top of you very quickly.”

Constable Kate Curyer, attached to the communications centre for 15 months, knows well the pressure of an operator’s part in high-risk incidents. “Take, for instance, a bank hold-up,” she says.

“You’ve got cordon points to set up before patrols get there. You’ve got patrols doing urgent-duty driving. You want to keep your ear on the radio to know who’s coming up (on air). You want to know which patrol wants to go to the scene so you can have them backed up. You’ve got to listen for them booking off on the scene.

“With 601s (high-speed pursuits), the pressure is huge. Another operator will sit in with you. So you’ve got someone talking in your ear, the SDO standing next to you and you’re trying to update locations. You’re also trying to get it (the location) up on the UBD screen to find out where the hell they are and pre-empt where they’re going to go.

“You try to understand the area and set up cordons in case the vehicle gets dumped. You’ve got other patrols popping up calling out cordon points.

“When it comes down to it, I want to know that my patrols are safe, and that’s when I feel the pressure.”

The more units involved in a high-risk incident, the more overwhelming the operator’s task becomes. Until a forward commander sets up at a siege, for example, an operator might have to co-ordinate patrols, negotiators, STAR Group, CIB, Welfare Branch, and other emergency services.

“Look at the Salisbury bus-rail crash (last October),” says Communications Centre boss, Superintendent Colin Cornish. “Our operator was trying to build up resources to deal with a horrendous situation.

“It seemed to be a job that was becoming bigger and bigger as moments went by. That would be quite a task to throw on someone’s shoulders.

“A lot of times, after the job’s over, we take operators away from the environment to calm them down, debrief them and bring them back to normality.”

Not only do operators face up to high pressure, but they also practise a measure of on-air psychology. So as not to fuel front-line cops’ exuberance in high-risk incidents, operators are careful not to allow emotion into their voices. Their training teaches them to maintain, at all times, composure in the way they speak.

To reveal excitement or alarm would, Paul Quee suggests, lead the line of communication “into chaos”.

An operator might be responsible for more than 30 patrols in a geographical area. To keep from burning out during a shift, he or she spends only about an hour at one time in a booth. After that, operators interchange with one another on telephone duties. That means time away from the booth to take 000 and 131 444 calls from the public.

And not all callers ring the communications centre simply to report minor incidents. One might tell of his or her plans to commit suicide, while another could even confess to murder – as has happened.

Says Quee: “It can be non-stop. The phones will just ring and ring and ring. It could be a woman who has been subject to some assault and is screaming down the phone for help. It could be a brawl on the street and somebody’s produced a knife and cut someone.

“Old ladies will give you their life stories. You’ve got to take a 10-minute conversation, condense that into 30 seconds, get the facts and put that into an incident for a patrol.”

Cornish recognizes the dilemma for operators who face the constant barrage of distressed callers. “We ask them to be negotiators, social workers and, sometimes, lawyers on the telephone,” he says. “They have to be involved in all these many facets.”

While operators’ work is rigorous, Curyer describes the communications centre as an enjoyable post. She says it is a greatly positive environment, in which one can “learn a lot”.

A former Salisbury patrol officer, she opted to transfer to communications to escape the frustration of heavy workloads on the front line. Operational work, she found, was a mental distraction to her both on and off duty.

Now – without paperwork, court appearances and overtime – the mother of two enjoys a “stronger focus” on her family life.

Quee, who went to communications after he sustained an injury on duty, also finds satisfaction in his work. He insists that “everyone enjoys dispatch” because it allows operators to play a part in front-line police work.

“We’re not at the front line,” he says, “but the work we do certainly influences what goes on. And it’s like all police work: you don’t know what is going to happen in five minutes. You could, at any moment, have a patrol call for urgent back-up.

“It comes down to teamwork between the dispatcher and the patrols. You’re co-ordinating their response and you work as a group. And, it certainly is good when, at the end of the day, you get the crook.”

At a cost of nearly $10 million, the communications centre began operations with the new government radio network last December. That involved a complete switch from analogue to digital technology, and a move to a brand new ground-floor facility in Carrington St.

State-of-the-art equipment, from furniture through to electronics, now abounds throughout the new home of SA police communications. The network is one of the largest in the world, and Cornish speaks of a complete radio management system at the fingertips of his operators.

And Quee says those operators have roundly endorsed their “much more friendly” work environment.

But, despite what most operators say the job has to offer, the communications centre suffers from something of an image problem. Most police, of course, prefer to work in operational fields, and so rarely apply for posts such as communications.

As a result, many end up there through frequent involuntary transfers. They begin with a five-week training course and continue through what they at first think will be a 12-month sentence. The upshot is that many outside the communications centre refer to it as “the punishment posting”.

Most operators find the tag offensive. “We take a lot of pride in what we do up there,” says Curyer, “and we don’t need to be told that we’re only there for one reason (a punishment). It’s unfair.”

Cornish, too, insists the tag is “unjustly levelled”. “Sometimes they (transferees) haven’t volunteered to go there,” he says, “but they go there (involuntarily) because we have to staff it.”

Cornish finds, however, that unwilling transferees nearly always come to relish their stints as operators. “After a while,” he says, “they realize the value of the place. It’s a great working atmosphere and there’s a lot of team spirit.

“Those who want to resume their patrol careers after their time there go back, and they’re much better patrol officers for it. But a lot of people say: ‘I really like the work here. I’m going to stay on a bit longer’. Some of them stay forever.”

To Quee, the great benefit of a job in communications is that it gives the broadest possible perspective of the police force. “They’re seeing what’s going on from the overall metro view,” he says, “which a lot of them don’t seem to see.

“They get to see the whole, big picture, and they then understand what is actually going on around them – with all the patrols and incidents.”

Naturally, Cornish wants more cops to consider stints in communications. He encourages them to cast out any preconceptions, visit the area and sit in with the operators. Most visitors so far have marvelled at both the practices and systems in place at the communications centre.

For any job, however, all applicants need a few specific attributes. But most cops understand that, first and foremost, an operator requires a cool head, clear voice and the capacity for quick thinking.

In the end, the communications centre might still draw too few applicants. But, even if it does, it will always remain one of the most important functions on the police landscape.

Says Cornish: “The most vital thing in our whole criminal justice system is that first telephone call that reaches police. Without that, nothing else comes – no courts, no barristers and no investigation.”