Day in a the life of a campus police officer

An day in the life of Campus Police Dispatch Supervisor, Nieves Suarez is busy, but not all that action packed.

Suarez’ average day consists of more tasks than working as an actual dispatcher. She has a number of responsibilities from hiring dispatchers to checking equipment and updating records. She describes her job as “a bit of everything.”

As the dispatcher on duty, Suarez was almost constantly answering calls from people and replying to campus officers also on duty. The most common call was seemingly for a police escort. The majority of these calls are for disabled students.

Another common call is about smokers on campus. Palomar campus has become a fully smoke-free campus, but a large amount of students still go to the old smoking locations to smoke.

Additionally, some of the calls were people needing their car jumpstarted, and sometimes, the dispatch receives calls regarding student on student disputes.

Suarez stated, ” [This is] a very common occurrence.”

Suarez also received some some ‘suspicious person’ calls. The department takes these calls very seriously, although its rare that these ‘suspicious’ people are actually a threat once the call has been investigated.

Since Suarez is also in charge of equipment, she had to discuss with the IT guy what new equipment would be needed in the campus police building.

When discussing what equipment they need for the new building, Suarez described “the biggest one” being official dispatch radios. Right now, they are currently working of off two improvised police car radios. Officer Suarez feels they are, “working with the bare minimum.” The dispatch center feels that in order to run more efficiently, they are going to need 3 dispatch radios which will cost a rounded $200,000.

Suarez explains, “with the dispatch radios we wont be stepping on each others traffic, with the radios that we have right now, if I wanted to dispatch something out and someone else is using the radio at the same time, one of is going to get bumped off.”

Although an average day in the life of Dispatch Coordinator Suarez might not be action-packed, its an important job that helps the overall betterment of the students.