Police Suggestion Dispatch overhaul

[Freedor]

Brief description of idea: Overhaul the idea of controlling. Currently, trying to dispatch is almost impossible. We all know that one guy who has to argue with someone over radio because he didn't like that he was asked to move his car, or the officer who has to explain himself in extreme detail to himself on radio. Therefore, as a dispatcher myself, would like to see some new features added. These new features are a radio stun, a radio ping, only allowing one person to speak at a time, tones, and the addition of some new callsigns. Each one of these features will be explained in better detail below

I think the most important feature on this list is a god given gift from the heavens were it be added, which is the radio stun. It would work like this; a government employee is going off on the radio. S/he is ignoring all commands of holding the traffic and insists on just yelling. How this usually goes is just everyone else yelling at him over voice radio at the same time until s/he eventually gets shot and we get 5 minutes of peace. If you could stun that person, the transmission gets cut off for approx. 5 seconds allowing someone else to speak. This could effectively solve the problem of government employees not shutting up on radio. If someone sets off their panic button, everyone gets stunned and he gets priority traffic.

While this feature is not as important, it could still be very useful to dispatchers. An officer goes to a scene and mutes his radio. After a few minutes of you trying to contact him via voice and text based radios, you could opt to use the ping. This could be an audiotary and visual alert saying that control is trying to contact you and to unmute radio and/or pay attention to text based chat. This could help mitigate the issues of people not responding to control.

This is the second most important feature myself, the dispatchers, and every other government employee will love. This is only allowing one person to speak on radio at a time. Basically, one person is speaking, and if someone else tries to speak, they get a beep and can't speak until that person stops. This combined with the radio stun, makes radio traffic near perfect.

This really doesn't add much to the gameplay experience, but it's a nice detail that has been talked about several times in the past, and that's ambulance/fire truck specific callsigns. It's far more realistic to call an an ambulance any of these, "ambulance 1", "medic 1", or "rescue 1", and fire engines are self explanatory. It's a nice detail that would be nice to have, but not really a big deal.

What benefits would this idea have for the department:
Radio traffic becomes bearable
It's much easier to get information across
Response times from units would be quicker
Information can get across generally
The community looks more serious as a whole

What potential negatives could this have for the department:
Some impatient govs will get angry over radio over not being able to talk
Priority traffic could be difficult if it doesn't need a panic button

Other additions: Another nice detail are tones for the fire dept. Take for example a 911 comes in for a structure fire w/ injury. Let's also assume that the paramedic and fire fighter both have their radios muted. Playing the tone will automatically unmute their radios to hear the transmission. Also possibly renaming the fire dept to station 1 for added realism.

 

[Casey Heller]

Not too far off realism wise..

Cops in Freedom Land, when they attempt to use the radio over one another, are blocked with multiple bleeps to not disturb the current transmission.
And although this can be abused, again, Dispatch or some other person would have the chance to mute them temporarily or lower there volume (maybe when a supervisor speaks?)

The idea of stunning when there is a panic, in fact, if it's used right, it could save more lives then lose them. We could make a new policy that when pressing a panic, a unit is automatically dispatched to them for the wellness check, and then the person that pressed the panic can state the emergency.
Doubt this would happen, but it might be useful.

I actually do like the idea of the ping when Dispatch has to get you, I think it can make things hella easier, however, text-based radio can just be used to reach a person or even phone number, but I see why you think it may be a clever method.

 

[Collier]

When Wewai was in charge of Dispatch, we made a development wishlist and discussed things we might want added. A few were quite similar to this. When I am home I can give this more of a thorough read and write a more comprehensive response based on specific elements of this post.

I'll go over our list again and talk to @Sir Zac as well to see if we want to modify it.

Overall I appreciate you trying to think of ways to make Dispatch more exciting

 

[Freedor]

I'm glad this suggestion thread can be of assistance, hopefully dispatching can be actually be possible and the subdivision grows.

 

[Ayjay]

I think many of the issues you've raised in this thread could be combated with the introduction of a radio manager, as Jordan suggested a long time ago.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1C0GujY16ha77j9DhXPbgDqQU0sKFfE_a3ykQIrNc6P4/edit?usp=sharing (Here's the doc)

The general idea of the radio manager would be that units are generally self-assigned (an extention of what Simon added recently), this could be a TFU unit or an RTU unit or even a patrol unit. If you hold down B then you could speak directly to your unit, which would allow for less radio traffic in the public channels without constant interference from other units. Dispatch is by default in the citywide dispatch channel, however can join unit channels in order to communicate directly with specific talkgroup.

If one or multiple units are dealing with a specific incident, they can move (or be moved by dispatch) into a TACOPS channel, allowing for that small group to communicate effectively, whilst still having a constant feed of important info via the citywide N chat.

I'm also not against having radio stuns and cooldowns as you've asked for in the OP, however this may not be as needed if we were to add a radio manager. This is all certainly possible to add in a relatively low timeframe (we have a lot of stuff left over from the original dispatch voice groups).

 

[Deleted member 6228]

This seems like a good compromise.

Have unit radio, if you want to talk to other units talk through dispatch. Any units on the same incident however can all talk to each other and relay info without dispatch

 

[The HitMan]

I like the ideas mentioned by @Freedor as they really could help to improve the department, however, there needs to more training on how to communicate over the radio and when to talk etc as people don't seem to understand that the radio is for emergency use and updating dispatch on where you are etc, not for having a chat with your buddy holding everyone up. Cameras need to be able to swivel as well.

 

[Ayjay]

Yeah it makes more sense to be able to have private channels, but still have the global channel ICE or to communicate with Dispatch. This IMO would make tactical entrances easier, and allow us to respond to more than one incident rather than one (which sometimes shouldn't) taking priority and limiting radio traffic.

 

[Freedor]

To add on to this suggestion I want to introduce signal 11, which is a tone that plays during priorities and restricts RTO to only emergency transmission. This would pretty much only be useful hand in hand with the other suggestions.,

 

[Mim]

I actually really like this idea as this is sometimes how radios are used in real life, different channels for different purposes and allows Dispatchers to sort of monitor rather than actively fighting with employee's

 

[Momo]

Denied, We are currently not willing to invest any development efforts into dispatch