The Dispatch Board: Calls, BOLOs, and Priorities

The board is the center of the whole CAD — every call anyone's handling, live, for everyone watching at once.

Creating a call

Title, location, priority (1 through 5, 1 being the most urgent), and a kind picked from your community's own list — covered in the "Customizing Call Kinds" guide if you haven't set that up yet. Dispatch can create a call at any time; if nobody's on Dispatch, any on-duty unit can too (see "Self-Dispatch" for exactly how that works).

Attaching and assigning

Any on-duty unit can attach themselves to a call — that's volunteering, sets them en route, and if the call was still pending it flips to active the moment someone's actually responding. Assigning is the other direction: dispatch sending a specific unit to a call, which only dispatch (or self-dispatch, when it's active) can do.

Editing a call in flight

Location, priority, title — all editable as a call develops. Bumping the priority up, or reopening a call that was closed too early, goes out over the radio automatically; a quiet correction like fixing a typo in the title doesn't. The board tries to only interrupt the air for things actually worth interrupting it for.

Closing and reopening

Closing a call is dispatch-only, always — self-dispatch never extends to this, on purpose. The same goes for reopening one that got closed by mistake.

BOLOs

A BOLO (Be On the LookOut) is a standing alert — a plate, a description, whatever needs eyes on it — that stays up until it's cleared or its expiry passes, whichever comes first. They can be corrected after being posted rather than needing to be deleted and reposted for a typo.

The map

Covers the real in-game area, built from the actual map data rather than a rough approximation — pins, calls, and locations line up with where they really are. See "Setting the Jurisdiction Map" for giving it a sensible default view instead of opening zoomed out over the whole thing every time.