Emergency Dispatch and Human Rights: Before the Sirens (Routledge Series on Practical and Evidence-Based Policing) - Softcover

Marina, Peter; Marina, Pedro

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1032951427 ISBN 13: 9781032951423

Publisher: Routledge, 2026

Synopsis

Through real calls, field narratives, and thinkers from Du Bois and Weber to Simmel and Foucault, this book reframes the dispatcher’s 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 30 years of street-level law enforcement experience of retired New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) Lieutenant Pedro Marina to argue that human rights protection begins not when officers arrive, but the moment someone answers the phone. The blasé 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 5-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.

About this title

About the Author

Peter Marina is a New Orleans native, sociologist, and criminologist, and Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminology. Trained at the New School for Social Research, Marina’s scholarship focuses on urban ethnography, transgression, and social inequalities, with particular attention to human rights, policing, and communities living on society’s margins. He is the author of Human Rights Policing, Down and Out in New Orleans and several other books and articles. Marina’s thinking examines power, resistance, and social control across diverse social worlds, from Pentecostal tongue-speaking churches and Caribbean ritual life to street performers and urban occultists.

Pedro Marina is a retired lieutenant with the New Orleans Police Department who served for more than 30 years in patrol, narcotics, robbery investigations, vice operations, and SWAT. A sociology graduate of the University of New Orleans, he held supervisory and command positions throughout New Orleans, including in the French Quarter, and received numerous commendations for exemplary service during his career. Lieutenant Marina lives in New Orleans, Louisiana, with his dog, Meggie.

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1032951427
• ISBN 13: 9781032951423
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 124