When an explosion rocked Belconnen around 7pm on a quiet Monday evening in late December last year, 16 emergency Triple Zero calls were routed to police within seconds.
"The [phone] lines just lit up," acting Inspector Ryan O'Hara recalled.
Explosions are always problematic for police because, as Inspector O'Hara readily admits "they could be anything".
"When these calls suddenly come in and it's clear that something major has happened, there's that immediate question of: what are we dealing with here? Is this a CT [counter-terrorism] incident? No-one knows, it's too early to tell," he said.
"That's where operator training is really important because we have systems in place where during this intense emergency surge period, we can quickly switch resources across to triage those calls, quickly get the important details and move onto the next one.
"That incident turned out to be something else [with no criminal intent] but for a while, it was a pretty intense time in here [operations].
"So that's why we work as teams; there is a very strong teams ethos internally and we have experienced sergeants working there in the room, alongside the operators."
ACT Policing Operations has come a long way since the early days of the radio room first set up in the former Jolimont Centre. Phone operators manually wrote out the details on "job cards", which were then prioritised, and passed onto a radio operator to dispatch a police patrol to an urgent task.
Every patrol had their own card, too, which they recorded their "jobs" on for each shift and it wasn't until 1989 that these task began to be computer-recorded, filed and dispatched.
Even now, almost 60 years later, the "job" term lingers on in the police vernacular. Working in the police force is still known as "being in the job" and attendances to incidents are always referred internally as "jobs".
But there is now a new jobs imperative at Operations, which has its headquarters within a freshly-revamped centre within a secure area of Winchester Police Centre. It's not about the tasks performed, but about recruiting more people capable of doing them.
"Our calls for service are going up and I think the COVID pandemic period, particularly during the early part when we were getting a lot of calls that weren't police matters but health matters, showed how we need to get on the front foot and build our workforce," acting Inspector O'Hara said.
Over 750 calls to Triple Zero are managed on average each week by ACT police, and there are over 3400 weekly requests for police attendance on 131 444.
Police operators largely are recruited from civilian ranks and the demands of the job are far more than that experienced in a conventional call room with a tough vetting process involved, psychometric testing, random drug tests and a nine-week intensive training period. Crime never sleeps, so the communications teams are rostered on a 24/7 basis.
Some who join as operators, such as Zane Micallef, have aspirations to perform other roles.
Mr Micallef, from Geelong, had applied to join the Victorian police force but was unsuccessful and moved to the ACT to seek a role with the federal police just over a year ago. He joined communications to "get a foot in the door" while completing his degree in criminology and now is aiming to apply to join the sworn ranks when the next recruitment round arises.
"From my perspective, working here [in police communications] has been a useful way of getting to know how the organisation works, building your skills and awareness of things like the priority response model, and learning how to think on your feet," he said.
"If anyone is uncertain about whether they want to go into general duties, this is a great place to start."
