Dispatcher Mode for UK Security Control Rooms

An incident comes in on a Friday night. The desk has three guards it thinks are nearby, a radio that's gone quiet, and no way to see who's actually closest until someone answers up.

What most firms do today

A radio channel and a whiteboard, or a spreadsheet of who's where that's already out of date by the time anyone reads it. The dispatcher calls round guards one at a time to find out who's free and who's closest, and the answer depends on someone remembering to check in.

When three things happen at once, that process doesn't scale. The desk ends up guessing, and the guard who gets sent is whoever answered the radio first, not necessarily whoever was actually nearest.

How TacDesk's dispatcher mode works

One live map. Every guard who's clocked in shows on the map with their current status: Available, On a Shout, On Call, On Break, Unavailable or En route. A dispatcher watching a guard's marker pulls that guard's phone onto more frequent GPS updates automatically, so the guards the desk actually cares about right now report position more often than everyone else on the system.

Incidents pinned as they're logged. Each incident shows on the map with its severity and how many staff are linked to it, with lines drawn from the pin to whoever's attached. Closed incidents can be brought back for the last seven days if the desk needs to check what happened earlier in the shift. A senior manager or admin can also switch to a global view across every site at once, rather than one venue at a time.

Guards attach themselves. When Dispatcher Mode and Mobile Response are both switched on, a new incident can auto-attach the nearest available officers without anyone touching the map. TacDesk checks who's currently on Mobile Duty, works out who's within the configured radius, skips anyone already tied up on another live incident or callout, and skips anyone who's marked themselves unavailable. The nearest officers get a push notification that they've been attached, and the reasoning, distance and availability, is written onto the incident as an audit note. A dispatcher can still take over any assignment by hand, and a venue can separately auto-attach its own on-site guards to incidents at that site (guards standing a fixed post can mark themselves "On post" to be skipped).

Route history, not just a dot. Pull up any clocked-in guard's actual path over the last 30 minutes to 24 hours, not just where they are right now, useful when a dispatcher needs to see where a mobile unit has actually been.

It reaches the car. For guards on mobile patrol, the incidents they're attached to render on the vehicle's own screen through Apple CarPlay or Android Auto, with a Navigate button that hands off straight to Google Maps. While the car screen is connected, the phone itself locks to a single "park to continue" screen, so nothing else on it, sign-in, reports, the dispatcher view, is usable while the guard is meant to be driving.

Live View slots straight in. If a guard activates a body-camera session, it shows up in the dispatcher's tray alongside the map and the incident feed, because Live View only makes sense with somewhere to watch it.

Why it matters

It answers "who's closest" with data, not a guess. The desk sees distance and availability instead of hoping the right guard picks up the radio.

Assignment gets faster on the nights it matters most. When three incidents land at once, the officers nearest to each one attach themselves while the desk is still reading the first report, and every attachment carries a reason a manager can check later.

It's a live coverage view, not just a call log. Status, position and incident load for the whole operation sit on one screen instead of being reconstructed from radio traffic after the fact.

Where it sits

Dispatcher Mode is included on TacPro and TacCommand. On TacStarter, it's a paid add-on: see the pricing page for the current price. It isn't part of TacFree.

Auto-attaching to roving mobile units specifically needs Mobile Response switched on as well as Dispatcher Mode; without it, a venue can still auto-attach its own on-site guards, but there's no roving pool to draw from. The live map itself builds on the same GPS-verified clock-in behind real-time GPS tracking, which is on every plan, TacFree included, and incidents raised through Dispatcher Mode still land as ordinary incident reports. Fleet-registered vehicles used for mobile patrol are covered separately under fleet management.

Start free on the core app, then book a demo to see Dispatcher Mode running on a live desk.