Dispatch
BOLOs
Be On the Look Out — a live alert to everyone on duty. Dispatch usually writes them, because dispatch is the one hearing the description come in over the radio while the officer is still driving.
Putting one out
Three parts, and you fill in what you actually have.
Vehicle — search a licence plate to pull in a registered vehicle, or type it by hand: plate, colour, make, model. A partial plate is still worth broadcasting.
Suspects — searched by name or date of birth and attached as real people, so anyone reading the BOLO can open their record straight from it.
Location — a postal, a street or origin, and optionally a direction of travel. The postal puts it on the map; the direction is what still makes it useful five minutes later.
Status
| Status | Means |
|---|---|
| ACTIVE | out and running |
| APPREHENDED | caught |
| CANCELLED | called off — wrong vehicle, false alarm, no longer relevant |
Closing them is a dispatch job. The officer who called it in is driving; you are the one who hears that it is over. An active BOLO on a recovered car sends the next shift after something nobody is looking for, and it is the first thing anyone sees when they run that plate.
Where they surface
- The topbar BOLO dropdown, each with how long it has been running. That clock is the fastest way to spot one nobody closed.
- Top of every search. Run a plate or a name with an active BOLO and it comes back above the registration.
- In the game, when a plate reader picks up a BOLO vehicle. The sync is automatic.
Writing one units can use
Over the radio, colour and body style beat make and model — nobody identifies a Bravado Buffalo at speed, everybody identifies a black four-door. Put the direction in, update it when it changes, and take it down when it is over.