Albuquerque PD
Old Center at Albuquerque Police
by Gary Allen, Editor
The Albuquerque police comm center is located in the basement of a 60's vintage building formerly occupied by the county sheriff in downtown Albuquerque. You can reach the comm center through underground parking garage, which astoundingly isn't secured by barriers or gates. Anyone could just drive right in and leave a package containing anything. In fact, dispatchers said the sheriff's intake facility is nearby and that closed circuit cameras are used to insure the safety of dispatchers who leave via the underground parking lot.
Inside the center, the ceiling tiles are in disarray, wires are running
everywhere, but dispatchers are going their duty taking calls and dispatching
units. They have three different job positions, each considered a "clerical"
position in the city personnel structure. They employ 39 radio dispatchers,
42 call-takers and nine so-called NCIC operators. The radio dispatchers
receive six months of training, and the call-takers and NCIC operators three
months. Overall, they have about 100 employees, none of whom wear uniforms.
They work standard 8-hour shifts, from 1430-2300, 2230-0700 and 0630-0300.
They have three open radio dispatcher job positions and one NCIC position. There is no career ladder within the comm center--call-takers must apply to become a radio dispatcher, for example, just like someone with no experience. Pay starts at about $9.62 for a call-taker and $8.82 for a radio dispatcher.
They dispatch about 347,000 incidents a year using SCC/Printrak CAD at 8 call-taker, five radio dispatcher positions, and one supervisor's position. The center is so small that they have shoe-horned in two call-taker positions adjacent to the supervisor's console. The consoles are arranged by twos. They have an EOC adjacent to the working floor.
Prior to Printrak, they had a PRC CAD system. Radio dispatchers handle one of five districts, with each district handling from 40-70 units depending on time of day and special activities. Two districts might be combined when activity is low (night shift) or when they are short a radio dispatcher (like when I was there).
The supervisor has access to radio, telephones, CAD and alarms.
Their incident type codes are arbitrary numbers, much like a 10-code system. But in this case, it's just a three-digit number, sometime with a dash and number attached (247-12). To an outsider, it's impossible to decipher. In fact, when President Clinton visits the city (I was told quite often, 3-4 times a year), the Secret Service requests a Albuquerque PD dispatcher to act as liaison--actually, they just decode the arcane numbers for the agents!
Right now, there is no way to create a multi-agency incident. The Printrak CAD supports it, and both police and fire are using the same CAD software. But the two centers are not linked in a way to allow a police call-taker to enter a police-fire incident and to have it appear at the fire department.
They have an MDT system and use it to dispatch officers to Priority 3 or lower incidents. For Priority 1 incidents the radio dispatcher must use voice, and voice is optional for some Priority 2 incidents.
Of course, all of this will be mitigated by a new comm center, which will be completed next April. Located on the west side of town, the center will bring police and fire (now about six block away) into the same building, but not into the same center. Fire dispatching is now performed by firefighters, whose union insists the positions remain sworn. Some in city government feel that fire dispatching should be civilianized.
Each position has a Dictaphone instant playback recorder and a manual PEI telephone device. Interestingly, they have a television between every-other console. A previous deputy chief insisted on the entertainment to keep the crews "connected" to the outside world, to reduce boredom and to keep the night shift alert. During my visit, all of the TVs were on, although the volume was turned down low.
Conclusion: I have my fingers crossed. This comm center facility
serving over 800,000 people is in need of an overhaul. The software is top-notch
and current (although they don't have the mapping module), the employees
are dedicated, but the facility is a bummer. The new comm center can't come
soon enough.
copyright 1998, 911 Dispatch Services Inc.