APCO's 64th Annual Conference
Albuquerque, New Mexico

One of the reasons APD needed a new facility was the number of console positions the city required for optimum operations. Some call-taker positions were in the rows of paired consoles, while this particular position was off to one side of the room by the exit door. (He was the first person to suggest I go ahead and use the camera's flash to get the best pictures.)

The shift supervisor's position was a large, circular console arrangement (okay, half-circle) against one wall. It too, had a television set in addition to the CAD monitors, which I thought was pretty interesting for a supervisor's console....

Notice the refrigerator against the far wall; the coffee pot was at the other end of this long room, where I was standing to take this picture. It probably would have been very inconvenient to leave this room to get something to drink; all the ancillary rooms around the outside perimeter of the Operations/Radio room were used for other purposes, such as logging tape storage and Custodian of Records copying, etc. The administrative offices were even further away from the Operations room, out past the small room housing the NCIC operators.

The city is separated into different dispatch areas; it can't all be handled off one frequency for the whole area, even for routine traffic. There were four separate console positions busy with radio traffic during our visit. (A fifth console had a 'clearance' on the air, so the others were handling some of the routine traffic usually handled by that console while the incident progressed. I didn't take a picture of that particular position, as the dispatcher was not doing all that much. She had that familiar expression on her face: a combination of boredom for the inactivity and hyper-alertness for whatever just might happen next.)

I spent a lot of time talking with the dispatcher in the photo to the right. She explained the various local codes in their CAD system for me and we had a lively discussion about ... well, dispatcher stuff. Albuquerque PD uses MDTs. (I found it interesting that officers indicated they were "on voice" when they weren't physically in their patrol units, because they'd have to be voice-called on the radio to be contacted!) Guess coffee breaks are coffee breaks, no matter what agency one works, right?