Crime Scene Response: The Call Out
This will be the first in a series of posts on how CSIs respond to and investigate crime scenes. I hope that these posts will give you a little insight to the process which may help you in developing scenes and dialog in your novel. I’ll be speaking exclusively about CSIs who are on-call as opposed to those working in shifts. Obviously, if your character works a shift (like graves) they are already in uniform or in their vehicle or office and can respond accordingly. But, what about the CSIs who get called out after hours? This is where it can get a little interesting. During my career I worked banker hours during the day and was on-call at night and on weekends. Depending on the size of the lab you may be on-call as much as every other week or once every six or eight weeks. Usually you’re on call one week at a time. In some labs you may also be on “back up” the week before you go on-call which means you’re the number two person called if something major happens or the primary criminalist is already on a call out.
Most agencies will give you an on-call vehicle and some even supply your phone. You are required to drive this vehicle everywhere you go while on-call, even on personal errands like grocery shopping or going out to eat. Of course, when the call comes you have to finish up what you’re doing and respond to the crime scene. This adds a little inconvenience to your life in that you usually have to driver separately from your family. So if you and your spouse go out for dinner you need to drive separately. Same thing with going to the kids soccer game, Thanksgiving dinner, or anything else you might do. You can’t take your spouse or kids to a crime scene because you don’t know how long you’ll be tied up (days in extreme cases). Obviously, you have to stay somewhat close to home when on call. You can’t go camping for the weekend or do anything that would prevent you from responding in a reasonable amount of time. Most agencies I know of require you to be en route to a scene within thirty minutes of a call and on scene in about an hour.
Different agencies have different policies on who actually can call out a CSI. Most of the time this is restricted to the Sergeant rank or above. Since CSIs are a finite resource agencies don’t want them called out on every little thing so a higher ranked individual will evaluate the request to see if a CSI is really needed. In some agencies only the investigations supervisors can call out the lab and patrol officers must make their request through them. Either way, the CSI usually gets the call from either the ranking officer, detective, or in most cases dispatch. Regardless, when the call comes in you have to take down pertinent information about the crime. Every CSI will have a notebook and their phone on the nightstand or in their vehicle. Here are some of the basic things we might have to note as the call comes in.
- Time and date of the call out
- Who notified you
- The crime scene location (address)
- Initial details about the crime including secondary scenes (this information may be incomplete or incorrect depending on the source)
- Time and place of your departure to the crime scene (this could be your residence, restaurant, or some other location)
- Finally, time of arrival on scene.
Your departures and arrivals are usually done via police radio so there is a record. Every criminalist will be assigned a call sign number. Sometimes this is an arbitrary employee number, vehicle number, or just your name. Here is a hypothetical radio exchange between a CSI and dispatch. When you talk to dispatch you typically only reference yourself; you don’t have to say “dispatch”. There are some websites that actually let you listen in to live police radio traffic in your area so you may want to do a web search for your local police or sheriff followed by “police radio” and see what comes up.
CSI: “651″
Dispatch: “651 go ahead”
CSI: “Show me en route to 1234 4th street from my residence”
Dispatch: “Copy 2147″ (2147 would be 9:47 pm in military time)
Then when you arrive on scene you might say…
CSI: “651 on scene”
Dispatch: “2231″ (meaning your arrival is acknowledged at 10:31pm)
There is no need to acknowledge what scene you are arriving at because you already made that clear in the initial call. If you needed to talk to an officer or detective while en route you would contact them on the radio using their call sign followed by yours. For example you might say “Charlie 23, 651″. This means “hey guy named Charlie 23 this is me (651) and I want to talk to you.
Posted on September 24, 2012, in Characters, The Crime Scene and tagged coroner, crime, Crime Scene, csi, detective, fiction, forensics, murder, mystery, on-call, police, police radio, thriller, tom adair. Bookmark the permalink. 5 Comments.
Tom, Good luck with your book! Wonder if I might add a few thoughts about The Call Out. You hit the nail on the head. I too worked days but we took turns being “on call”, a week at a time every 4-5 weeks depending upon vacancies in the unit and vacations. The good thing about being on call was the guaranteed overtime. The bad thing about being on call was the guaranteed overtime. I tended to dislike it towards the end of a really busy week, but enjoyed it two weeks later when the pay check arrived. We heavily staffed the the day shift while the evening shift had but one or maybe two people. Midnights was left to the callout person. If the evening shift person got slammed, then the callout got called to help. Two or more scene locations was a very good point. There might have been a shooting in one location with the suspect continuing a crime spree or committing suicide elsewhere. Or the suspect may have been wounded and fled until he dropped or perhaps someone was taken to the emergency room where evidence may be need to be collected and wounds photographed. Someone would have to make the call if one CSI could effectively go to both scenes or if a second callout was needed. Weather often played an important role, as a driving rainstorm can wreck havoc with trace evidence. So can time and insects. It’s amazing how quickly ants can carry away blood from a sidewalk! On a clear night one CSI might be sufficient but if a storm threatened to trash one of the scenes then it was prudent to spend more of the mayor’s money and call a second person. Another time it might be required to have more than one callout is when civil unrest dictates getting in and out just as quickly as possible. Another secondary scene can be the police station, to photograph the suspect and/or victim and in cases of police shootings, to collect an officer’s firearm and often the whole uniform which may contain trace evidence. Alcohol… While my fluids of choice were Dr. Pepper and tea, some of my co-workers preferred the hard stuff. Major scenes that required multiple callouts in the late evening sometimes resulted in questionable blood alcohol levels being present on the scene….. A little off track, but with us the crime scene unit and homicide unit ran their callout rotation differently. While CSI rotated every week, homicide detectives were on call from one homicide to the next. Sometimes that meant 2 days and others it meant 2 months or more. While they might get called to a shooting or stabbing, if the victim didn’t die, they were still on call. Different departments have different payroll rules for callout. Back when I was on the job, we had a minimum benefit of 3 hours per callout. If it was important enough to call us from home, then it was 3 hours of OT. That’s not to say we spent 3 hours on the callout. I recall one night when I was trying to work in my attic that I was called three times inside of about 5 hours. CSI was a great job and I didn’t mind the callouts. It usually took me about 30 minutes to arrive on scene and luckily the men and women in patrol usually made good use of the time spent waiting…..they usually did a pretty good job of searching for and marking the locations of spent casings, projectiles, blood trails, shoe impressions and the like. It was pretty easy to tell which young officers had aspirations of going to the detective bureau and I was happy to acknowledge their hard work and help them get there. Bob _____
Hi Tom – A quick note to let you know I’ve nominated you for the ‘Lovely Blog Award.’ I wanted to get the word out to writers, etc. about your useful blog and the information you share. You may elect to participate or not. I picked up your blog from following Nic at defrosting cold cases. You’ll find my post of nominating you on my post of Sept 25. You may participate or not – the ball is in your court. Sheri
Thank you very much, I will check it out.
Some extra details about the police communications. Up here (Canada), rule of thumb, the officer, the detective or the CSI will call the dispatch by pressing a button on his radio (unaudible tone), then the dispatcher will reply by giving his car number on air. E.G. The officer in car 1234 will press the dispatcher button, the dispatcher will say something like “Go ahead, 1234″, then the vocal communication will go. The calls are sorted by daily sequential ticket number and closed (signed) by the officer’s matricule number when he/she’s done. Traffic will be local to the station(s) the frequency is assigned, even if the dispatcher is located miles away at the regional HQ and can work many districts at the same time. One won’t hear much from the specialized departments (K9, SWAT, CSI…), because they’re also based at the regional HQ and are called on case by case basis. In the larger (major city) services, the ticket closing part will often be done off-radio (computer), but the specialized departements can be heard on air once in a while on the main frequency and they often got their own channels as well.
Moreover, each service likes to give a specific name for its dispatchers. Montreal calls it “Studio”, the provincial SQ uses “CGA” or “CDT” (French acronym for Call Management Agent or Telecommunication Centre) and so on.
Another interesting thing about police communications is to be familliar with the local jargon. Each service has its own slang and it is as important to color your story as the local accent. Some services use codes (10 code or type code. e.g. You got a 253 at this or that address), some use actual words most of the time and others use a mix of both depending on what they want to say or how common it is (code for bender fender or dui, but words for rare events).
P.S. I really enjoy your site.
WOW! That is great information, thank you so much for sharing it. You bring up couple of really important things to consider that I want to touch on. First is the use of “local slang”. Authors should really check with the department they are featuring in their books to see how they talk on the radio. If you are using a fictitious agency then try to find a similar sized one (and similar location) to emulate. I’ve seen some agencies just use the officer’s first name (because they only have a few officers in a small town) and they just talk normally (no codes). Others may have their own unique code system. Agencies also may have slang terms they use for certain locations (high crime areas, a housing complex, sub-stations, etc.) and you can enhance the realism of your dialog by incorporating those terms. The second thing I wanted to touch on was modern dispatching which is mostly conducted by MDT (mobile data terminals; computers). Vocal transmissions still occur but a lot of information is communicated via these terminals and the information is open to discovery by the defense (at least in Colorado). A lot of CSIs are not issued MDTs though because our traffic time is so low so we typically still use the radio for everything. Lastly, you reminded me of a conversation I had with a bloodstain expert in Ontario. He was the only one in the Province. For those not familiar with Canada it would be like having a response area roughly from Chicago to Miami. His lab actually used a plane to ferry him all over the Province to work crime scenes and in large geographic areas with a centralized laboratory or law enforcement system you may see quite a bit of that. Alaska is another example. Just something to keep in mind. Thank you so much for sharing your insight JF and feel free to weigh in anytime!