Former Police Call Handler - AMA

[Tiredfox34]

Fresh out of my year as a Police Call Handler for a Midlands based force.
Happy to answer any questions people may have about the job, will be truthful about the highs and lows 🙂

5 years - full respect!
I'd agree with that statement , although I found the guys who stick around in call taking where I was tended to reduce their hours..
That or do a couple of years in call handling move to despatch or go for officer.

I fully admire paramedics they're heroes on there own right too!

Do many people call in error? I’m wondering as recently I must have hit my iPhone in my pocket and next thing my watch has a loud alarm beeping on it and I can hear someone saying emergency services how can I help 😱all my emergency contacts were automatically contacted at the same time too

How do breaks/ toilet breaks work?
Are you targeted to take a certain amount of calls?

If it's anything like ambulance call handling then breaks are scheduled so no/little overlap and toilet breaks you put yourself unavailable
You can't target how many calls as they're incoming

Have you ever had a kid call up? As in, primary age.

Thanks for starting this thread. Will you be able to share any calls that particularly affected you?

Yes so many! All 999 calls without a request for service are put through to the police by the initial operator- even if you hang up. It's the most common call and there's a process for dealing with them.
With watches and phones you cal call emergency services with it being unlocked so it's really easy to do!! Just one of those things, so don't worry, but if you get a call back it's just a standard check on welfare. It helps to answer these :)

Yeah, sometimes. Personally never for anything serious but have heard of it a couple of times.

There was a board with how many handlers are available- If it was green or amber you can put yourself in break and take comfort breaks/make a brew. We had a target of less than 4% away state but I've never gone over that or not got up when I needed to. When it's red absolutely could go toilet but not really the time to grab a drink
There are targets but not on how many calls. Your call length and processing times are monitored but it's not a stressor, if you're not on track you get support to get there

We get a lot of Mental Health related calls, police get involved in those where someone is high risk of hurting themselves, these broke my heart a fair bit.
The call that affected me the most was a HGV driver who'd hit a jumper whilst driving on the motorway.. I still think about him

Thank you, yes I did answer and apologised

Has the recording of a call you've taken ever been used in court or on Crime watch?

Could you tell when someone is or isn’t doing CPR over the phone?

Do you need call centre experience to apply for this role? Thanks

Is there progression to other areas of policing (not actual officers) from this role?

I used to work as a civilian investigator for a force PSD - so many complaints where calls were backed up and no resources available to send, but when we looked into officer's movements they were deliberately logging themselves as unavailable/committed to something else when they were (at best) grabbing something to eat or (at worst) shagging.

Were you a) able to tell or at least suspect when officers were taking the piss and b) did it annoy you when you had so many calls waiting for allocation?

Also did some frequent callers work out the buzzwords that would get a higher log to incident that you knew were probably not that serious but because they'd said that you had to prioritise them (happens a lot with ambulance dispatchers)

What are the facilities and tech like in this kind of job? I hear some are state of the art and some are rat ridden grotholes.

Just checking: you would be the person who answers after a caller has told the 999 operator they want the police, right?

What kinds of conversations would you have? I know with the ambulance service they can talk you through CPR etc, what do the police talk about? Wording it clumsily!

Also, is it right to call 999 if someone is smoking marijuana whilst driving a car? I have called this in several times but at least once the handler sounded a bit puzzled about it.

Oooo no, I know this happens but not very often. I'm aware of a few people who've had to write statements for court but none while I was there had to attend.

To be honest- never had this, ambulance would deal with this kind of thing, I have no idea how to guide someone to give CPR

Nope! Customer service experience ideally. At interview they have exercises to see if you have the trainable characteristics. The training is quite good, I remember thinking on my first day that there was no way I could do this job, it seemed so alien but the training is thorough and supportive

Hmm... Kind of
So majority of calls handlers go over to despatch but it's not for everyone- wasn't for me. Team leaders is an option for some. There was a new team building to support recruitment, training and quality control that recruited from call handlers. Other than that.. not much. You can apply for internal vacancies though- they advertise for other departments, but generally more of a side step situation that promotion opportunity

I can see that, I've heard of occasions of this happening but I've not had to deal with it myself. But it's frustrating when our queues are high and responses that should have officers at scene within 1-2 hours and they're unable to get there for 6-8 hours because you know you're letting people down. But I genuinely don't know how much of this is due to demand and/or officers shenanigans

Yes this absolutely happens. There are forums we were made aware of where people would discuss things to say to get police out to them. It's frustrating when you get those, you know they don't need attendance but because of certain disclosures or threats you can't risk not sending. It stops help getting where it really needs to be but your hands get tied

When I left, the main control room was being refurbished so I imagine that'll be nice.. it wasnt horrible but tired and a bit run down.
The techs alright, it has to run a lot at once so powerful processors etc but standard hardware really. There is some really interesting software coming through which will make the job easier, that was beginning to be distributed. I think some playing around with AI is happening too