Disabled man tries to fend off home invasion as deputies wait down the street

[blues]

When you need backup now...

[RoyGBiv]

When you need backup now...

[BehindBlueI's]

Back on topic, please. This isn't General Discussion.

[jnc36rcpd]

Good on Wise_A for taking the time to explain communications protocols. While obvious to LE, these protocols may be unknown to average earth people. I will also remark that, while similar, these protocols may vary from department to department. In the bad old days of my former department, it was protocol to run priority to the alarms set up in "burglary-prone locations" and monitored by the city dispatcher. OK, that made sense for the sound of breaking glass at the gun store, but not so much for fence jumpers at a pool late at night. For years after we ended that foolishness, a park law enforcement agency in our area ran priority to any alarm at one of their buildings. I'm not sure there's much to steal or anyone to injure at a closed recreation center, but those alarms did get a quick response. (Both agencies have since matured.)

I seldom see much value in the propaganda of the "woke", but they have remarked that how a call for service is interpreted, classified, and dispatched can affect the use of force upon police arrival. I think there is some truth to that. Absent any other factors, a subject with concealed hands at the scene of a reported armed robbery is likely to be viewed as higher risk than one at the scene of a parking complaint. While some armed robbery reports are bogus and cops have been killed on parking complaints, the information provided by dispatch is what one has to work with until it can be verified or disproven.

By way of example, many years ago when the city was on its own radio channel, the single dispatcher on midnights stopped answering radio calls for several. She then hit the alert tone and dispatched us to a burglary in progress because a dog was barking in the neighborhood. When I inquired why this was being dispatched as an in-progress burglary, she informed me that we had had multiple burglaries in the neighborhood (true), the complainant had heard a neighbor's dog barking, and, therefore, this was a burglary in progress. OK, perhaps a suspicious situation call was in order based on previous burglaries, but B&E in progress seemed a leap to judgement.

[KellyinAvon]

I'd like to highlight--for the Regular People--some stuff (not picking on anyone). LEOs can skip freely. I don't have access to the audio from the 911 call, or even a complete transcript. How you call 911 is as important as what you're calling in for. I would be interested in hearing the how the call was put out on radio, which would go a long way to explaining how the calltaker and dispatcher interpreted the information they were receiving. The complete unedited 911 call would be very illuminating as well. What I do have is some text snippets.

First off, I'd be interested in seeing how the call was categorized, and how exactly that call type is typically handled in Broward. In my area, a calltaker would have coded that as either an Active Burglary or a Disturbance, but that's because "Disturbance" covers quite a lot of ground and can get quite an aggressive response. It would have been up to me as the in-progress police dispatcher to communicate the situation. I feel this was probably done correctly, because 18 fucking guys showed up. Non-serious stuff is generally not allowed to tie up so many available resources.

From my point of view, a report of an active burglary / prowler raises all kinds of red flags for me. Very often, these actually turn out to be mental health or intoxicated subject calls. MHU and intox both present obvious scene safety issues for patrols. MHU/intox with a weapon is an oh-shit--it happens enough around here that I'm not exactly unfamiliar with it, but not so often that it's an every-day or even every-week thing. The gentleman in this call says some distressing things: "He's breaking in, can I shoot him?" is kind've a big one. Personal bias on the part of the calltaker or dispatcher can play a role too. Did they assume this guy was not playing with a full deck because he described himself as being older and disabled?

Now, even assuming the dispatcher isn't labelling this guy crazy, even a non-MH/non-intox caller with a firearm presents a scene safety concern. While there's really no scripts for dealing with this scenario, my personal strategy is to advise the caller to gather the home's residents in an interior (preferably upstairs room), which separates them from both the attacker and the responding deputies. The last thing I want is for the deputy to be confronted with a homeowner holding a gun and the subject. Presuming I have all the information I need about the subject, I can move on to verifying that all the residents are in one place sitting tight, and then I can ask some are-you-crazy questions--do you know why someone would do this, have you had any small burglaries, etc. While that's happening I can run a check in our system to see what the caller's been up to. Once I'm comfortable they're not crazy, I can reassure them, give them updates on the response, and then give them instructions on what to do when the patrols are ready to speak with them. Bear in mind, from an industry perspective, I am given a fuckton of latitude by my agency to handle these things. I'm following some approved principles, but pretty much everything is freelance. Some places only allow you to advise callers to do stuff in the most simple and dire circumstances.

The point is this: I would label this call a shitshow, but that would be unfair to shit. The guy fucked up. His neighbors made the situation so much worse. Yes, from a dispatching/calltaking perspective, it is our job to organize chaotic input into usable information, but holy shit, they're not making it easy, and then complaining about it later.

The other part of the equation is this: you don't know what the local policy is, or who wrote it. This situation might mandate, say, a sergeant be on-scene (I've seen dumber). Hell, they might have a policy to stage like that. It would be dumb, but the police very well might not have written the policy.

In any case, I think that the angle to discuss this story is, what can we learn about it as armed citizens? Namely: don't meet attackers at the door, be calm when talking to dispatch, etc. I would also suggest encouraging your jurisdictions to pay more than $34k a year for dispatchers. This is the sort of shit you get when you cheap out.

Maybe the 70 year old polio survivor will handle comms better on his next home invasion.

[Vista461]

18 guys assigned to a burglary call?

I wish I had 18 guys on my dept, let alone on one shift, and all on one call.

[Wise_A]

Good on Wise_A for taking the time to explain communications protocols.

Thank you. I will also openly admit the following:

(1) There's a lot of potential for mistakes to be made between "problem" and "po-po". Sometimes, it's the caller--for instance, I had a caller dial in to the non-emergency line for a juvenile relative not refusing to get into her car for a custody exchange. Mid-sentence, sandwiched in between other complaints, she mentions he's threatening to kill himself, which puts the call in a whole different ballpark. So that was not great (it escalated into my first time talking to a suicidal subject, wheeee!). But the other half of the problem-to-police connection is the calltaker, and it's up to the calltaker to interrogate and guide the caller. How much that happens is dependent on policy, training, and so on.

(2) The specific policies and staffing levels of the jurisdiction matter a lot. For instance, in my area, every burglary alarm gets a response. Doesn't matter if it's this or that business that has an alarm at closing time 3-4 days a week, every week (we have two like that)--and we're fairly busy. Some of the LEOs here, I'm sure, work in places where alarms don't get a response without video or an on-scene caller. So just because I said some stuff doesn't mean it's necessarily true, and I've tried to note where that's the case.

(3) Sometimes dispatch just fucks up. I have fucked up, a lot. Which brings me to...

Maybe the 70 year old polio survivor will handle comms better on his next home invasion.

No, dude. That's not how Quality Improvement works. You don't bemoan your fuckups, you ask yourself what you can learn and move on. There's a bunch of stuff I ruminated on while I was reading about this case. How can I better handle deconfliction between callers and police? How would I have advised that caller? What priority notes would I have put into CAD? How can I communicate the danger if I see police staging when there's imminent risk to a citizen? Then I went to work and I talked about it with co-workers, and we all talked about this stuff, at length. Because our agency is pretty badass at serving the community, muthafucka.

But I'm writing for the regular people I saw in the thread. That stuff is not relevant to them. What's relevant to them is the 70-year-old polio survivor. He called 911 and had an undesirable outcome, and I can identify some things he should have done differently that I feel may have affected that outcome. If we don't want to repeat the outcome, we have to avoid repeating the mistakes, both in the call center (see prior paragraph) and out in the world.

[KellyinAvon]

Thank you. I will also openly admit the following:

(1) There's a lot of potential for mistakes to be made between "problem" and "po-po". Sometimes, it's the caller--for instance, I had a caller dial in to the non-emergency line for a juvenile relative not refusing to get into her car for a custody exchange. Mid-sentence, sandwiched in between other complaints, she mentions he's threatening to kill himself, which puts the call in a whole different ballpark. So that was not great (it escalated into my first time talking to a suicidal subject, wheeee!). But the other half of the problem-to-police connection is the calltaker, and it's up to the calltaker to interrogate and guide the caller. How much that happens is dependent on policy, training, and so on.

(2) The specific policies and staffing levels of the jurisdiction matter a lot. For instance, in my area, every burglary alarm gets a response. Doesn't matter if it's this or that business that has an alarm at closing time 3-4 days a week, every week (we have two like that)--and we're fairly busy. Some of the LEOs here, I'm sure, work in places where alarms don't get a response without video or an on-scene caller. So just because I said some stuff doesn't mean it's necessarily true, and I've tried to note where that's the case.

(3) Sometimes dispatch just fucks up. I have fucked up, a lot. Which brings me to...



No, dude. That's not how Quality Improvement works. You don't bemoan your fuckups, you ask yourself what you can learn and move on. There's a bunch of stuff I ruminated on while I was reading about this case. How can I better handle deconfliction between callers and police? How would I have advised that caller? What priority notes would I have put into CAD? How can I communicate the danger if I see police staging when there's imminent risk to a citizen? Then I went to work and I talked about it with co-workers, and we all talked about this stuff, at length. Because our agency is pretty badass at serving the community, muthafucka.

But I'm writing for the regular people I saw in the thread. That stuff is not relevant to them. What's relevant to them is the 70-year-old polio survivor. He called 911 and had an undesirable outcome, and I can identify some things he should have done differently that I feel may have affected that outcome. If we don't want to repeat the outcome, we have to avoid repeating the mistakes, both in the call center (see prior paragraph) and out in the world.

Quality improvement? Who the fuck are you, Deming or Juran? Shit, you make Scott Israel look a lot less narcissistic. You just stay 500 yards away, the regular people will handle things.

[Wise_A]

Quality improvement? Who the fuck are you, Deming or Juran? Shit, you make Scott Israel look a lot less narcissistic. You just stay 500 yards away, the regular people will handle things.

"Quality Improvement" is a term in my industry. So for calltakers, you look at whether you followed protocols (scripts, policies, etc), how you coded the call, whether you noted important information, and what your 'customer service' was like. On the dispatch end, how you sent the call, whether you provided important updates, and so on. The goal is to review past cases so that lessons learned can be applied to future calls--ie, never make the same mistake twice.

As to the "regular people" handling things--no, on every call where there's potential danger to the caller, I'm absolutely as concerned for the caller as I am for my units. But if a caller is truly hysterical or irrational (and the overwhelming majority are not even upset-enough to cause even a slight problem), and I think that they may pose a danger to the police, paramedics, or fire...then yeah, I have no problem advising units to stage. I've done it on EMS calls with aggressive callers that threatened calltakers and responders, or locations with extensive scene safety notes--people attack EMS all the time, and very often believe that the person taking the all is the one that's going to respond to the scene, so a threat against a calltaker very often becomes an attack against the responders. Dispatchers frequently have to weigh the call's response type, priority, and the risk of delay against the safety of the paramedics/EMTs. It's nerve-racking and I hate it, but it must be done and I must do it. I've advised police units to stage when a suicidal subject advised they were armed. And I've sat there advising a unit to stage, that there was extensive MHU history with the caller, that they had a history of attacking police and fighting EMS, that they were armed...and been ignored while they went in anyway. The next thing I hear is a panic alarm, 10 seconds of that unit wrestling with the caller, the word "knife", and then nothing.

Hence, being in need of emergency assistance is not a carte blanche to say and do whatever one wants. Now, bear in mind, all that stuff I just said--this is a very low-crime area, and we really have very few problems. Someplace like LA or Broward County or wherever--magnify all that by 10x.

If you want to have a productive dialogue, fine. If you want to continue your current track, I'm going to disengage.

[Coyotesfan97]

Quality improvement? Who the fuck are you, Deming or Juran? Shit, you make Scott Israel look a lot less narcissistic. You just stay 500 yards away, the regular people will handle things.

You know Wise_A is a dispatcher and is talking from that perspective right?