Open Mic

Kent of the North, just had a brief post of a reporter at WNBC New York, who made a comment on air not realizing her microphone was live.  I’m not sure what was said as the clip that he posted is no longer valid. But the point made is that around microphones one should always assume that they are on and broadcasting. I was reminded of many "live" mic stories from the Force and I thought I’d share a couple.

When I was posted in La Ronge, we had a feature on our radio system that allowed us to radio our comcentre and have them patch us through the phone system so we could talk to anyone (cellular phones hadn’t reached La Ronge yet, when they did it took exactly 3 days before someone had an accident while talking on one, but I digress).

One day we received a call about a fellow that had threatened some people with a rifle, fired a shot in his house and was now barricaded inside. The place where this guy lived was a short wooded dead-end road that I believe we called Queen Street.  There were all of five houses on this road, and it had, for some reason, far more than it’s fair share of gun complaints. Another one that stands out was when a fellow who called us to complain of an assault by a neighbour greeted us by pointing a rifle at us as we drove up – followed quickly by myself and my six foot seven, 290 lb partner trying to fold ourselves up inside the small confines of a Chev Blazer while I backed madly and blindly away from the scene. But again I digress.

Because it was a gun complaint all of the members working turned out to it, both of us. I drove down Queen Street until near the house, but still out of sight and parked. As we knew the phone number of the guy with the rifle I called telecomns and had them call the residence and patch me through to him. The idea behind any barricaded person call is to have it end quietly and peacefully with the barricade person coming out unarmed, so my goal was to talk to the fellow, convince him to leave his rifle inside, walk out into the middle of the road where we could see him and then arrest him.

There is no great secret when it comes to talking to someone barricaded in a house, generally patience is the key. Our guy was drunk, of course, which complicates things somewhat, but essentially you talk to them calmly and quietly. You try and find out what is bothering them so much that they’d hole up with a rifle, and most importantly you try and gain their trust and show them that you care. Ultimately you want to convince them that it is in their best interest to come out (without a gun) so no one, including them, gets hurt. After a little bit of time we had accomplished much of that, with our guy on the verge of coming out and giving himself up.

Normally when the comcentre would patch you through the phone system they’d hang up at their end, but because this was a gun call the operator left the phone off the hook so they could monitor what was happening. Essentially this meant that there was a live mic on their end, but it hadn’t been a problem. Then shift change happened in the comcentre and the following exchange took place, which everyone in this drama could hear.

New Operator: Anything going on?
Old Operator: It was quiet all day, but La Ronge has an idiot in a house with a rifle.
Idiot in House with rifle: Did you just call me an idiot?

And there with one ill chosen word we went right back to square one.  Eventually, we got back to the point where trust was restored and the fellow came out onto the road, hands in the air. No one was hurt and alls well that ends well.

More typically open mic incidents happened when the radio in the car, office or on your belt would have the talk button accidentally held down, sometimes the results could be painful, sometimes they were funny.

To be continued…