Emergency Dispatch and Human Rights

Name: Emergency Dispatch and Human Rights
Price: 246.75 AUD
Availability: PreOrder

Before the Sirens

By: Peter Marina, Pedro Marina

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Hardcover | 14 October 2026 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

Format
Hardcover

Dimensions(cm)
22.9 x 15.2

Hardcover

RRP $284.00

$246.75

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Available: 14th October 2026

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Through real calls, field narratives, and thinkers from Du Bois and Weber to Simmel and Foucault, this book reframes the dispatcherâs role from a clerical function to a moral one. Dispatchers make split-second decisions that impact the fate of everyone a call involves, yet they remain the most consequential and least examined actors in policing. Sociologist Peter J. Marina draws on urban ethnography, social theory, and the thirty years of street-level law enforcement experience of retired NOPD Lieutenant Pedro Marina to argue that human rights protection begins not when officers arrive, but the moment someone answers the phone.

The blas© attitude, warrior and guardian orientations, the sociological imagination, dual-subject asymmetry, and tri-subject asymmetry all converge at the dispatch console, where a single framing decision determines how the caller is heard, how the officer understands the situation, and how the silent subject who never speaks is ultimately treated. A five-year-old named Tia Hernlen, a woman whispering from a locked bathroom, a jogger stopped for existing while Black, and the Trayvon Martin case all ask the same question. Will the dispatcher see all three: the caller who speaks, the person who never does, and the officer heading toward a scene?

The book will be of interest to emergency service dispatchers, non-dispatch supervisors/managers, and students in criminal justice or emergency service programs, as well as those involved in policymaking, training, and implementation within policing organizations.

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