Week One: Intro, Tours and Eight Seconds of Dead Air During 911 Calls

Week one began at the , the soon-to-be home of the new consolidated dispatch center.

The , Bayside and River Hills academy started last year, funded by a three-year grant which ends this year. Fox Point started their academy in 2000 and the goal was "to build a relationship between the police department and the community," Fox Point Police Chief Tom Czaja said.

Each week, I'll be writing about the class and my reactions to what we were taught. Upcoming columns will feature training we'll receive on things like how to process a crime scene, how officers handle and process OWI arrests, fire arms, high risk traffic stops and drug searches with specially trained drug dogs. 

This first week was mostly introductions and background on each of the departments. We were given a tour of the Bayside facility, and Bayside Police Chief Bruce Resnick went into detail explaining how 911 calls make their way to the dispatch center.

If you dial 911 using a land line, there is an eight-second delay before the phone at dispatch even begins to ring. Although if you dial 911 with a cell phone, there are multiple towers with different panels that pick up the call and dispatch receives the call nearly immediately. Resnick demonstrated by calling on a land line, and having another student call using a cell phone. Even as both were dialed from dispatch, within a few feet of one another, the cell phone call went through immediately.

On Wednesday, class will be at the River Hills Police Department and we'll be given an inside look into the hiring process for officers, along with the field training process and evaluation.