I’m writing this on the eve of my final classroom test to be a Police Communications Dispatcher with Scottsdale Police Department. Some perspective:

• I applied with Scottsdale in late August, 2008
• After applying I took a written test, had an oral interview, passed a background investigation, and completed a polygraph exam.
• Then, due to budget issues, I was put on a wait list
• In March I was given a call back with a preliminary job offer. This involved taking a urinalysis, physical exam, and psychological evaluation.
• Finally, on March 14th, I started with the city

They kind of eased us into the first week with a full day Human Resources introduction. The presenter was pretty fun considering the topic was fairly dry. There is, after all, only so many times you can cover sexual harassment policy. Nevertheless, this day also including getting name badges and applying for benefits all of which was pretty official and feel-good.

If Day 1 was Cake, Day 2 was an English Muffin — probably better after it had a bit of time to bake. Starting at 0500 when you aren’t used to it isn’t fantastic. Still, after spending half a day talking about what we would be doing during the next four weeks of classroom we moved right into material. We covered all sorts of introductory things such as the Police Department Mission Statement “Excellent, Integrity, Initiative,” the chain of command, what number to call in if you’re sick. We covered training performance evaluations and expectations, the training timeline (9 months!), where to take a smoke break, and how classroom would work (chapter, then quiz).

I apparently did not take some of these particular items seriously enough and ended up doing rather poorly on the two quizzes the next day. Thankfully, being as it was the 1st day at the department I was given the opportunity to study and re-take the quizzes on.

The late night working on memorization with my roommate paid off though as my scores on the subsequent tests were quite a bit better and quite a bit of a relief as failing those tests again would likely have meant dismissal.

Classroom continued with memorization of city geography, hands on entering test calls into the CAD system, role playing, and more policy.

One of the days was spent driving around — in an organized fashion — the entire city in an attempt to orient ourselves to where things are and how the city has been developed.

Finally, at the end of four weeks of classroom we are ready to take the final phone test. I’ll let you know how that goes.