Quote:
Originally Posted by jayswin
Hell, I called in two groups in a forest lawn parking in what I thought was a very serious/dangerous situation. They were towing a guy's car up on to a flat deck and the guy was yelling and pushing people and then jumping up on the ramp, getting into the car as it was being pulled up. It looked like he could easily get seriously injured or killed.
The guy was screaming that he was calling in more of his people to come down, so the other guys (presumably from the shop) were actively calling more of their friends to come down, then everyone got heated and in each other's faces. It almost looked like a huge racial fight starting, with more on the way.
But even with that, the dispatcher seemed almost annoyed at the call, asking if there was more than what I was describing and if I could see weapons, etc. It was almost like "Yeah, thanks for the call, maybe we'll send someone to a brawl in forest lawn, but probably not!".
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The problem I find is that the difference between the callers and the calltakers is pretty huge. Over the course of a 12 hour shift, a calltaker will probably deal with 1-5 fights. More if it's a reasonably warm weekend evening shift. Believe it or not, but there are "typical" fights. The game-changer is weapons. You see 2-3 guys fighting? What sort of fighting? Fist fighting? Ok, cool. Will probably need 1-2 cars. You just heard one shout that he was gonna go get his gun? Ok, probably need a faster response. You can see someone pulling out a shotgun? Gonna need more cars and a faster response...
I know that I always ask "Is there anything else going on that you can see or think we should know about?" because some of the answers I've gotten have been very useful, and in a stressful emergency situation, folks may not think to volunteer info, they have to be directly asked for it.