RAPs

The most recent OEMC newsletter has a section on the back page discussing RAPs (backlogs, or Radio Assignments Pending events). It states, in so many words, that dispatchers who have backlogs should protect themselves by putting RAPS in.

That's sound advice, and you'd really be an idiot not to do so. But keep in mind that a RAP ticket isn't the be-all and end-all. Don't get lax, as some of us tend to do, once the backlog is in - having it in doesn't protect you if you have a unit become available and you still have "yellow" jobs. And trust us, if a complaint comes in about "Delay of dispatch," everything you did from the time that job came in until the time it was dispatched will be scrutinized. And you'll get nailed.

When it really comes down to it, backlogs only "protect" you to a certain extent. In some cases, it's to a negligible extent. We've been privy to people getting disciplined for delay of dispatch even when there was a backlog in. We won't go into details of certain instances, but what you think is an iron-clad alibi to put in that To-From, won't hold water if there's a citizen complaint about "It took one and a half hours for the police to come to my [initially] anonymous parking complaint." And if they need someone to hang it on, guess who's taking the fall?

You. If you haven't realized that in recent weeks, you have blinders on.

Anyone care to share stories? You've been using anonymity on the blog as a guise behind which to attack coworkers lately, how about using it for positive purposes this time. Use your experience to help others.

Some of you really don't get it.

In light of recent events (Read: Durkin Park), supervisors are toughening up. They're finally feeling heat like we are, and they're finally being held accountable for the actions of their subordinates (us), which is actually how hierarchy tends to work. A lot of us have just forgotten about that because for so many years, supervisory feet haven't really been held to the fire.

We're not taking up for supervisors, and we're not siding with them. All we're saying is do your damned job - what can they say when you're totally on top of your game?

Okay, they can still say things if they don't like you or have a personal vendetta against you (is M.K. still reading this?). But when you do your job correctly, it minimizes the number of things they can "get" you on. There's no reason for you to be holding jobs just because you have a backlog in, and there's no reason for you to take a total of less than 80 calls when you're working in a 911-calltaker capacity for six and a half hours. If you're logged in for six and a half hours (and who really is), that equates to roughly 12 calls per hour, which equates to roughly one call every five minutes. While others are taking over 200 calls every day, which equates to roughly 30 calls per hour. Or roughly one call every two minutes.

We've heard of talk about how there's no SOP that states how many calls you have to take per day, and therefore there's no mandate. No. There isn't. And that's not what they're after you for, either. They're after you for being on busy for five minutes at a time while the rest of us get our asses kicked taking these calls. Stats are printed every day showing how long you were logged on, how many calls you took, and what percentage of the log-in time you spent on busy.

The "no SOP" argument works on "number of calls." It does NOT work on "I was on busy for about two hours out of six and a half." And if you can't get that one through your head and tidy up your work performance, then whose fault is it if you get gigged?

Stop trying to figure out ways/reasons to justify your laziness. And that laziness is another whole topic we'll post on in a couple of days, after we get verbally reamed by the lazy people who attack us for posting this little rant/warning.

Five posts for the price of one.

Surprise. We updated. Plenty. They're not dissertations like the original Durkin Park post, but we don't think the posts are just mindless drivel to take up space - but we're sure you'll tell us otherwise if you so believe.

No comments under this one. You have five to choose from. Pick your poison. Read, post, & be merry.

Or be in whatever mindset the job puts you in. This should hold you over for a day or two while we either enjoy our RDO weekends, enjoy our suspensions, or just enjoy not thinking about the job while we're not working. Take your pick, we're not saying.

Remember we warned you about

How you need to watch/cover your ass because if they blame you for screwing a citizen's life, it could screw your career?

We were thinking about, but forgot to mention in our 2-page dissertation, the fact that it's not only your career at risk - it's your financial well-being, too. And we don't mean standing broke in the unemployment line, although some of the people who collect unemployment seem to live more lavishly than our working-daily asses do.

We mean lawsuit. The two PCO IIs under investigation have been named in at least one lawsuit. If the city fires them (we hope the city won't, but we know the city), it's the city's way of saying:

They fucked up on their own. We set rules/guidelines, they didn't follow them, and we did what we had to do on our end. We've washed our hands of those horrible wrong-doers...go after them.

Whether we like to think about/admit it or not, and whether or not other people like to give us credit for it (Read: the PO who posted a comment about how the most stress we deal with is when relief is late, for example)? We hold people's lives in our hands. And if something goes wrong, it's not human nature to admit one's own fault.

It's human nature to blame all of the 10-year-old-fighting-me, boyfriend-kicking-my-ass-after-I-let-him-back-after-the-15th-time-he-kicked-my-ass, we-let-our-neighborhood-go-to-shit-because-we-didn't-raise-our-kids-right bullshit on someone else.

And that "someone else," our faithful coworkers, would include you and us.

A lot of people said...

Ruiz is a good guy, he used to work here, he won't screw us over.

What are those people saying now? Either he's not all they said he is, or he's grossly misinformed and has no idea what we really do or deal with on a daily basis. The people who talked about how the place was looking up with him coming here have gone amazingly mute.

Speaking of Executive Directors,

When the hell are we actually going to get one who knows or cares to find out exactly what we do? Maybe much of police brass has forgotten what it's like to be a PO on the street, but at least they - okay, more than half of them - actually were POs on the street before. And look at the problems they have on the other side of the radio from bosses who've "forgotten where they came from." At least there are ranks that they came from to forget. We're just slapped with E.D. after another with no clue. And each one seems to be farther removed from our reality than the last.

Problem is, these people have degrees (we believe, or so it's claimed), and they've majored in business administration or basket-weaving and such, but have never put on a headset to talk to a PO or a citizen.

Oh, what are we thinking, they don't put headsets on to do that, they go to community meetings and give us up like a drug habit.

You talk about a glass ceiling,

We're thoroughly convinced that the next decade or two will not bring forth anyone who's worked his/her way up from the Operations Floor to a level/position that doesn't require being in uniform.

Unless, of course, it's some nice detail spot while you're still a PCO. We have people detailed off the floor who really never worked the floor on Madison. And probably never will.

But we still don't see any of them making it past floor supervisor, if that far. In the history of OEC, only two people (okay, three if you count J.A.) have made it from Operations to a position ranked higher than Watch Manager. One was a monumental fuck-up, one is in the corner office now.

And amazingly, the one who's there now was never a dispatcher or calltaker, and has more of a grasp on what we do than the MF (that's monumental fuck-up, not what you thought) who was both.

Watch your ass.

There are more than just two PCOs staring face of termination. There are also plenty of suspensions getting handed down, 2 and 3 days at a time. We haven't heard of any 1-day suspensions at all. And, of course, it's not taking them long to mete out discipline. Our brethren are getting screwed before they even get a chance to bend over.

The city's gavel is swift. And hard. It must be made of wood instead of metal.

Durkin Park, Part 2, or maybe 3.

We'd like to entertain the topic of how the dispatchers were served. One of them reported for work, and was told to turn in her work IDs, her headset, and even her parking sticker. As far as we know, the other one still hasn't been served. Rumor has it that they were to be served at their homes, but a cooler head or two allegedly prevailed and decided that wasn't the best option (although it did happen to a former employee around the beginning of the M.K. reign.

So, opinions on that, please. Try to keep it from turning into a mud-fest like the last thread. Although we must admit, we appreciate the fact that noone attempted to name the dispatchers/supervisors under investigation.

New open post

For all of your gripes not related to the Durkin Park fiasco.

For starters, you might want to discuss how a large chunk of 1st Watch didn't show up for work this past Saturday night. Although that fact was much to the dismay of 3rd Watch employees who got mandated in droves, after the previous Saturday's events, can you blame 1st Watch?

Keep your damned criticism.

Well, the media's in our asses again. At least it's not the front page, but it's the editorial page of the Sun-Times. As usual, shock value and half-stories prevail. For those of you who are starting refusals to patronize media outlets (Good man/woman), we'll dice the editorial up into misinformed excerpts here. And they can take this information and print it in their rag.

It took an appalling 26 minutes for dispatchers to direct police to a bloody brawl.

Okay, that's already a known fact. What's not widely known is the reason(s) why. The investigation just began this week. You've printed that officials say it should be done within 30 days. Jumping the gun, perhaps?

Officials said the response time...should be 2 to 3 minutes.

Right, in spite of police department general orders that allow for 10 minutes to dispatch Priority 1 calls. In spite of the general citizen belief that in a city of 3,000,000+ citizens, there are enough police to address everyone's "issue" immediately. Keep believing misinformed "officials" who can't decide whether we take 57 million or 2 billion calls a year.

...Not everyone left adrift of the 911 system is so lucky. In 2002, [Ronyale White] call 911 four times before she was shot to death by her estranged husband.

And it was determined that the call was dispatched within the established time parameters. There was effectively no delay in the dispatch of that initial call, and it was officially determined that the officers who were dispatched within those time parameters did not respond in a timely manner. But all that information detracts from the mud-slinging aimed at us. [PCOs: We TELL you that if they can pin it on you, they will. Even if it's NOT your fault.]

Hundreds of 911 calls are made a day.

Really? Try thousands. On a busy day in the summer, we can easily surpass 20 thousand 911 calls in a 24-hour period. And on the best of days, there are less than 40 people assigned per hour to handle up to 1,200 calls in that hour.

Not to mention, what about your quotes of "57 million" and "2 billion" per year? 57 million calls a year is 156,000+ calls per day. But saying "hundreds" minimizes our jobs instead of acknowledging how much work we do well. Now that something's gone wrong, we're just pieces of shit to blame things on.

It would be unreasonable to expect a flawless performance by dispatchers and police. But there is no room for error when lives are at risk.

Then hire robots. You can't put stipulations on what should and shouldn't be flawless. Either you expect flawlessness or you don't. How can you admit unreasonable expectations, and in the next sentence say the opposite? Self-contradictory statements hold no water.

At the very least, there should be no second chances for dispatchers and police who compromise or undermine this system.

So then the policy should be "Revolving Door." You keep your job until you *allegedly* fuck up once. Then you're out the door to make room for the next sucker to hang around until he/she "fucks up" and gets thrown to the wolves. The 3rd Floor Atrium might as well have an alligator pit dug out in the middle of it.

We recall a time a couple of years back when CPD had a "Media Day" of sorts. When the media laid weeks of hell on the department for police shootings, CPD invited the media to do simulations at the range, and they found out that the job they were criticizing wasn't the simple task they assumed it to be.

And we think that OEC Administration should do the same. Invite the media to sit in with 911 calltakers and dispatchers and find out firsthand what a stressful, daunting job we undertake every day.

But that's a pipe dream. We'd have to be backed and not get "thrown under the bus." We'd have to be *believed in* and have someone on our side.

Durkin Park

If you haven't heard about the Durkin Park incident then you're either been asleep in roll call or you seclude yourself from the lot of your coworkers. And it also means you haven't paid attention to the news.

You can see the Executive Director's official OEMC press conference on the matter at CLTV if you scroll down through the video panel. It's entitled "OEMC Durkin Park press conference."

You can also see an article in the Daily Southtown, yesterday's front page of which said very boldly that two 911 dispatchers have been suspended, which was incorrect. They've been placed on administrative leave with pay. At least we can say that they weren't stripped of their due process and immediately placed on suspension, the prospect of which had several people on the Ops Floor up in arms.

And of course NBC 5 joined in, since they're always the quickest to report on OEMC wrongdoings. You can read their latest article here, and see a video snippet here.

We don't know what else was or wasn't going on on the zone during the time of the incident, but we've worked Zone 6 and were amazed at just how busy it is, and how many things are going on at one time. It includes Districts 007 and 008. 007 is an absolute hellhole, and 008 is questionably the largest (geographically speaking) district in the city. 008 is so big that 10-sector cars don't respond to 30-sector jobs because the sectors are literally several miles apart.

It takes a certain skill level to work Zone 6 on a regular basis, and as with everything else in a public safety job, it's not recognized publicly. In fact, in the 12-year history of OEC, we have yet to see a news story where an employee was lauded for the job he/she did. Noone in public safety (except for the fire department and, occasionally, the police department) gets any kind of recognition in the public eye until something goes wrong. And unfortunately in this situation, things went horribly wrong.

We won't comment on the ongoing investigation, and we won't speculate on why the job didn't get put out, and we won't mention who the dispatchers are who were involved (and you won't either, not even by initials this time, no matter how poignant the rest of your comment is). But we ourselves are waiting to find out what was going on that kept the call from going out before it did. We're hoping that the PCO IIs will have solid reasoning for their sake (and for the sake of all of us, indirectly). But we're honestly befuddled.

And we ALL know that they're going to be used as examples. So are the supervisors who are being investigated (you won't name or initial them, either). In the NBC 5 video snippet from the community meeting following the incident, the executive director is quoted as saying:

I'm very unhappy with the way the dispatchers handled the situation.

Huh? Excuse us? We must have missed the whole part about how the situation is under investigation, and no determination is being made until the investigation is completed. We must have also missed the whole "apparently handled" disclaimer that would give an indication that "No, we haven't already decided that you're fucked."

The crowd broke into applause immediately following that statement by the E.D. Of course they're going to love it when even the boss of the people they're blaming sides with them. We imagined the whole huge crowd turning into vampires lusting after the blood of the PCO IIs, and breaking through the ceiling to fly across the city to find them. Maybe that's why NBC cut the scene so abruptly.

We also believe we missed the outrage over these teens who run rampant through the neighborhood wreaking havoc, and the explanation for where the hell their parents were and why they didn't know that their children were involved an what's been described as a riot at 10:15 at night. That could be because the news focused on hanging dispatchers, but who knows.

Where the hell were the parents? How long has this problem been going on? How aware/unaware of it were district personnel? Are we too stupid/too naive/too quick to sweep things under the rug, to face the apparent racial motivation for the attack here? Why the hell, when sergeants can (and do) monitor pending events as they're supposed to, they can tell dispatchers "Event number such&such is a 19P/5P" but were just nowhere to be heard when all of these calls came in about 8445 S. Kolin? It smacks of traffic pursuits where we almost had to redline sergeants because noone would answer up for the notification thereof.

But we digress. We're not trying to render the PCOs blameless, but we are trying to touch on points that the media neglects to keep the shock value of their story.

Also quoted from the E.D.:

When these investigations are concluded, we will issue appropriate discipline, possible termination.

You hear that, people? You're being watched (moreso than you know, more on that later). You're being scrutinized. You're in a position where you can play a major role in whether or not someone lives or dies. You're in a position where if something goes wrong and police/fire/OEC administration can pin the blame on you, you're up the creek without a paddle. We tend to get complacent with the day-in-day-outs of the job, and forget all of these things. It's the same thing every day, the same calls, the same people calling. And we get tired and frustrated. And our Giving-A-Damn meter falls into limbo. Complacency kills. It could kill a citizen, which in turn would kill your career.

We're not saying to internalize the job, and take it home with you. Not by any means, it would be hypocritical (you'll notice this is the first blog update in weeks, because we try to leave the job at the job). What we're saying is cover/watch your ass. Those PCOs we're all feeling worried for? It's going to be one of us next time.

And there WILL be a next time. Trust us.

And head over to Second City Cop. Lot of comments on their post about the topic.