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.

Well, that didn't work.

Daley wins another election in a landslide.

Better luck next time. By the way, when do contract negotiations start, again? Months after the current contract expires? Also from the same Scum-Times article:

Contracts with city unions expire June 30 and a showdown looms. Last time around, the police contract was handed down by an arbitrator, and it took 28 months to nail down an agreement with the building trades that ended up denying retirees back paychecks.

28 months. Don't the contracts last for 36? We seem to recall our previous contract expiring in 2004, and the new one getting ratified in October of 2006 - and not until after sworn personnel got theirs. We don't predict the next negotiations proceeding any more quickly. Now that the mayor has won a 6th term, his belief of invincibility has surely worsened. And you know what that means for his employees, especially since most of our unions decided not to endorse him for another term. We expect to feel more wrath.

Payback's a bitch.