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Computer-Aided Dispatch
A computer-aided dispatch (CAD) system is a highly specialized computer system that uses telecommunications and geographic display to support police and other first responders, such as fire and ambulance services. Specific to police, CAD is used to dispatch officers to incident locations about which citizens have called for police services, to record officers’ self-generated activity, to facilitate communication between police officers and dispatchers who support officers in the field, as well as to keep track of calls for service, officers’ locations, and their activities. Because a CAD system tracks the activities of officers on all service calls, it is an important source of data for community policing. This entry details the two key types of data that CAD systems produce—unit history data and calls for service data—and discusses the uses of the latter in community policing.
Unit History Data
CAD systems produce data from each communication that has been entered into the system by the officers and the dispatchers about officers’ activity while in the field (i.e., unit history data). In unit history data, each record denotes a specific communication between an officer and a dispatcher. For example, an officer who pulls over a vehicle may look up the license plate of the vehicle to determine whether it is stolen or may ask the dispatcher to run a person’s driver license for warrants. Detectives conducting investigations also communicate with dispatchers about interviews they are conducting and their other activities. Each record in the data contains a date and time and description of the activity. Depending on the CAD system, the format and content of unit history data can vary.
Unit history data is primarily used for examining resource allocation and determining staffing levels for an agency, since it provides the most detailed information about officer activities. For example, the data contain the number of officers dispatched to each call and the amount of time each officer spends on a call. Thus, unit history data can be aggregated and examined to determine whether current staffing levels are appropriate (i.e., are the correct number of officers assigned to a particular shift), as well as to anticipate whether additional officers will be required over time. These data are also used to determine police geographic boundaries within the jurisdiction (i.e., redistricting), which supports the community policing practice of assigning officers to a particular geographic area.
Calls for Service Data
CAD systems also produce data about incidents that officers are dispatched to or incidents they have discovered themselves. In calls for service data, each record represents one call for service. These data are different from unit history data where each record represents a correspondence between the dispatch and the officer over the computer system, in that calls for service data reflect a snapshot of the entire call after it is over. For example, where unit history data show the time spent on the call by each officer who was dispatched to the call, calls for service data show the total time of the call from when the first officer arrived on the scene to when the last officer cleared the call.
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