Dispatch

Panic Alarms

A panic alarm is an officer saying I am in trouble now. It arrives as a red banner over whatever you are doing, with a tone, and it is the one thing on the console that outranks everything else on screen.

What you see

The banner names the unit and where they were when it fired. Several alarms stack, newest first.

The tone plays once per alarm, not on a loop. That is deliberate: a siren that never stops gets muted, and a muted alarm is worse than a quiet one. Volume and mute are per device, so the setting on the dispatch machine is separate from anyone else's. They sit on the banner itself rather than in the CAD sound settings — see Your Settings.

What you can do

Dispatch gets two actions, and it is worth being clear about the difference:

Dismiss is for you; cancel is for everyone. Dismiss when you have seen it and are working it, and the banner is now in your way. Cancel only when the alarm itself is over — the officer is safe, or it was a false alarm — because cancelling takes it off every screen in the city, including units still driving to it.

Dispatch has no respond button, on purpose. Responders get a reroute action so they can put themselves on it; you do not, because you are not going. Your job is to send someone and to keep the channel clear.

Working one

The unit that fired it is marked in the units panel and on the map, so you can see who is nearest without reading callsigns off the banner.

Two things worth doing in the first ten seconds: get units moving, and hold the radio channel so the officer can be heard. Hold is in the radio panel — see Radio.

Your own alarm

If you fire one yourself you get a smaller banner with only CANCEL (FALSE ALARM) on it. There is no dismissing your own panic — you either need help or you do not.

After it is over

Cancelling clears the alarm but not the incident it belongs to. Whatever happened still needs the log written and, usually, a report. The alarm is the alert, not the record.