Communications/911

Overview
The Communications section is housed in the police department and is directly supervised by Capt. David Hipple, email. A minimum of two dispatchers is assigned to each patrol shift to handle incoming routine and emergency calls as well as dispatch all calls to police and fire units in the field.

Dispatchers:

• H. Marston (Supervisor)
• D. Thompson (Supervisor) 
• T. Sims
• T. Strickland
• Y. Brown
• S. Dixon
• A. Robinson
• E. Edwards
• J. Guthrie
• S. Williams

A Look Back
Police department communications was much different in the 1920s than it is now. Housed in City Hall at the time, calls for service were answered by clerks. The answering clerk then turned on an outside light to indicate to passing police officers that a call was waiting.

Later, with the advent of one-way radios, the police cars had receivers in their cars capable of receiving information but not transmitting. With this system, citizen calls to the police department were received by a clerk who then called the Atlanta Dispatch Center to relay the message. The Atlanta Dispatch Center then put the call out to the Decatur police units three times in succession to ensure they received the information correctly.

In the 1940s the department acquired its first radio system capable of two-way communications--citizen band models loan by a resident.

A 1957 in-car radio system is shown at right.

Today, police officers communicate with each other and with dispatchers on sophisticated radio systems, mobile data terminals, alpha/numeric pagers and cellular phones.