Emergency Buttons?

[JBU2010]

Does your department's radio system have the capability for an emergency button on the officer's end?

Pros and cons? It's on their MDT's, Portable Radio and in-car radio. Officers can hit it in distress and the Dispatch center's radios "cry out in distress", but it doesn't do any good when they do not advise Dispatch of their location.


It's that orange button..

[hitnrun]

We have those on our portables and in our cars. Your right, they don't do much good unless you put out your location. However, there are some models going through testing with our department that have GPS capability. We'll see how that turns out!

[MrJim911]

My officers have them on their portables and MDC's. Having AVL would help, obviously, with not knowing the location. But we do have policies in place to handle both scenarios.

[Sierra]

Some departments are equipping their vehicles with GPS and have been for sometime. Hitting the panic alarm with give dispatch at least the general idea of where they are if out of the car.

[princecaspian]

The new motorola models have a nice "Emer" button that lets dispatch pinpoint the location. Of course, if you hit it when the radio is off, or accidentally, its not good.

[Jay7376]

I have that button on my radio, however it doesn't work. I don't think our crappy radio system can handle it.

I have it on my MDT as well, and it works, however dispatch does not monitor our status on the MDT only on the CAD screen, so it is pointless.

The last time this topic came up I mentioned how I was playing solitaire on my MDT when I accidentally hit the red button. It was several minutes before dispatch brought it to my attention.

[MDEMT280]

As of a few years ago (when I left the communications center)... yes, we had emergency buttons. They were on the MDTs, the portables, and the mobile radios. They cause all manner of ungodly alarm to go off, so there's no way that dispatch can ignore it. However, there was no GPS in them at the time (though they might be changing that). There were AVLs on the cars, so if the AVL system was working right, you could at least get near the scene.

[MrJim911]

They cause all manner of ungodly alarm to go off, so there's no way that dispatch can ignore it.

Big ditto for that. Alarms go off continuosly until we silence them, and they will continue going off repeatedly after each silence until we reach the officer and get him to reset his radio. No ignoring them here.

[michiganstud]

We carry that exact type of radio and yes, everyone in the county will tell you that the emergency button DOES work.

I've never hit though. A lot of the guys put their keys on the antenna and that touches it off.

[Valor55]

The deputies' radios in our jail have a feature where if they are horizontal more than a few seconds they automatically send out that alarm.

Of course we can't have that on the street. It'll screw us up reclining the seats to sleep. :D

[britishcop]

Pretty much every Police Force in the UK have Emergency buttons on the radio. In my Force, you press it for two seconds before it activates and that sends an alarm to everyone's radio and to comms. It also shows the collar number of the person putting out the Emergency call. Don't really get many accidental activations. Don't think there is a sound worse then the alarm going off!

[DeltaV]

We've got them on our portables, however they have been deactivated. Our radio system is so old that we don't have identifiers set up. They were deactivated because whenever one would be set off, an alarm would go off in dispatch and they would have no clue who pressed the button. The powers that be decided that instead of having the dispatchers check on all officers, it would be a better idea just to disable the button.

When we finally go to the 800mhz system, I'm sure they'll be enabled again.

[Mike Romeo]

The deputies' radios in our jail have a feature where if they are horizontal more than a few seconds they automatically send out that alarm.

This may be the reason we get phantom alarms at times from Officers on the road.

However, if I just walked into some crap, it works well - so long as central knows where I'm at. Otherwise, it's just a radio crying for help. The MDC interface works the same way - central would send units to where I last marked out.

[james13f]

We have them.

PROs:

No way to not hear the Officer/alarm
Anyone in Communications can copy the traffic

CONs:

Takes the Officer off of his actual channel
Other Officers can't copy transmissions

Personally, it's not like a screaming Officer doesn't shut everyone on the channel up... I don't quite see the point to the 'E' buttons.

I'd rather have the Officer stay on their actual channel... so I know the only people that can truly help him are getting real-time information, not a relay.

[JBU2010]

Wow that's weird. On our Motorola 800Mhz series, it activates an alarm on the Goldcom console. It then gives the officer priority access to the repeated to go ahead with his traffic.

The officers do not hear the alarm go off, so emergency tones need to be set off and that gets everyone's attention.