This piece has been written by a Police dispatcher based somewhere in the UK. It has been written for all of the men and women serving at the front of the #ThinBlueLine:
“We are quite an eclectic bunch, we have a mix of old, and relatively new like me, well, when I say relatively new I have 15 years service, but on the scale of it, I’m still working with people whose boots have more service than me.
We know our wee patches well and some of us are lucky enough to be working our old stomping grounds still, via remote as such.
We hear the fear in your voices, we hear the frustrations in your chatter, we hear the anger in the messages you send us in reply to our tasking you to seemingly bone tasks when you’ve been running around like yer arses are on fire for the last 3, 6 or 9 hours.
We actually really appreciate how patient and flexible you lot are.
We do like to share jokes and witticisms on the air and we also roll our eyes and mutter unprintable things at the Inspector when they come on the air and play fun police and chastise us for “improper radio procedure” We feel the pain you feel when one of our own goes down.
We watch the CCTV as you struggle to stay safe, as the hordes swarm around you like pack animals.
We watch our tracking system and know that your nearest backup is 20 minutes away.
We watch, helpless, as you and your buddy are getting a hammering, we’re many miles away and we are, totally and utterly powerless to help.
We are aware, that you lot are the edge, you lot are the frontline, you lot are that thin line between law and order and anarchism.
Please be aware NO ONE has your safety as their priority more than we do.
We are the people who send you to the calls that could end your life. I assure you now, it’s not something we do lightly or without the right checks being carried out.
So when we call you, at 58 minutes to the hour it’s not cos we want to, believe me.
We do so because a Mandarin in slacks and a cool silk tie will ask why you weren’t sent.
They will ask what your duty termination time was. They will ask me if I had any idea why a simple dropped 999 call could turn out to be a scene of a multiple murder.
They will ask why I didn’t “think” of the possibilities that the male with the hood up at the bus stop was the guy with the knife we’d circulated three weeks ago.
They will ask what steps I took to ensure the woman sat in her car at 4 in the morning wasn’t suffering from some sort of invisible mental break down.
That’s why I need you, and your eyes and your ears more than you need me, that’s why, no matter how much you think your Comms staff are harassing you, we aren’t, we just need keep you and ourselves safe”.
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