Identification of persons based on verbal descriptions
is one of the key skills of police work. This includes
identifying suspects, but also locating missing persons,
identifying a person needing help in a public assist call, or
finding and helping a person who is threatening suicide.
Correct identification can lead to reduced loss of life,
reunions of missing persons with their loved ones, and
apprehension of suspects, while incorrect identification
can have terrible unintended consequences for both
officers and civilians.
Traffic incidents (collisions and crashes) are among the
most common call types handled by Emergency
Communication Centers (ECCs). They are also among the
most complex call types because they represent such
a range of possible situations. These can range from
“fender benders” with no injuries and little or no property
damage—in which case a single law enforcement officer
might be an appropriate response—to mass-casualty
events involving trains, buses, or other large, multipassenger vehicles.
Relatively few dispatch agencies using the International Academies of Emergency Dispatch protocol systems have achieved Accredited Center of Excellence (ACE) status. Despite ACE being the gold standard for implementation of these systems, no research exists about either barrier to ACE achievement or drivers of ACE success. s: The objectives of this study were to describe the barriers to achieving ACE and to identify characteristics that indicate success with respect to...
Structure fires, although infrequent, require significant resources and personnel to effectively complete critical tasks in a short time frame to achieve positive outcomes. While it is important to dispatch the appropriate number of resources rapidly, there is a risk to over-allocate responding resources both to the public and to the responders by responding with lights and siren. A standardized emergency fire dispatch (EFD) protocol-based system is important to quickly identify working structures fires so appropriate resources are allocated in an effective manner...
When evaluating the information provided by 911 callers, Emergency Police Dispatchers (EPDs) use scripted protocols to ensure that important details are not missed and that questions are not omitted. Specifically, at the beginning of the call, EPDs ask callers to "Tell me exactly what happened" (TMEWH). Since EPDs must select the correct Chief Complaint (CC) Protocol based on the caller's response, getting a complete response to TMEWH—and interpreting it correctly—is one of the most significant elements of an EPD's job. However, no studies have yet evaluated the use of TMEWH in gathering...
The International Academies of Emergency Dispatch® (IAED™) exists with a mission to advance and support emergency dispatch professionals and match callers in need of emergency, health, and social services safely, quickly, and effectively with the most appropriate response. Therefore, IAED sets the highest possible standards for emergency dispatching worldwide through conducting research, creating protocols, designing training, offering professional development opportunities and certification for emergency dispatchers, and publications on the trade and science of emergency dispatch...
When I was eight or nine years old, my dad gave me a copy of the book Anguished English, by Richard Lederer. The book was a compilation of puns, jokes, and double meanings, mostly accidental, that Lederer spotted in the world around him. Often these came from headlines, news articles, or ads. A lot of the jokes depended on one word that could mean two different things-or different words with meanings that were similar, but not quite the same. The book was incredibly funny to me as a child, but the confusion caused by the double meanings...
There's a line from a science fiction novel that, to me, captures the drama of applied research. In William Gibson's 2003 novel Pattern Recognition, an unknown person or persons are publishing video fragments online one at a time—pieces of a larger story, discovered at random on hidden sites on the internet. Taken together, these fragments are known as "the footage." In the book, whole online forums are devoted to discovering who is publishing the videos and why. One of the ongoing debates concerns "progressives" versus "completists"...
Alertness is important to assess during many medical emergencies; however, assessing alertness proves difficult in a non-visual emergency dispatch environment. Little is understood about how to best gather an accurate report of patient alertness during an interaction between callers and Emergency Medical Dispatchers (EMDs). The primary objective of the study was to compare two versions of a Key Question (KQ) intended to gain an accurate report of alertness, to determine whether either demonstrates a higher degree of caller...
Opioid overdoses have reached crisis proportions. One response has been to increase the availability of naloxone HCl (commonly referred to by the generic name naloxone), which reverses the effects of opioid overdose. The Medical Priority Dispatch System (MPDS®) includes instructions by which the Emergency Medical Dispatcher (EMD) can prompt the caller to find and use naloxone on overdose victims. However, these instructions are only provided on dispatch Chief Complaint (CC) Protocols on which overdoses are expected to be handled...
