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Sunday, January 15, 2012

Surveillance Plans

A couple of nights ago, I ran a stake-out for the first time in a while, and this was after only participating in a few stake-outs before. Not that you know what I'd already learned, I'm going to share the new stuff I picked up.

One relates to establishing locations; one that we established turned out to be way too active. It was like Grand Central Station. There's a Dunkin Donuts and a Subway and a couple of restaurants. It probably would be a good location for an overnight stake-out, but this one ran from 8pm to midnight. We pulled it as soon as we figured it out, and reassigned the volunteers.

Another relates to deciding what volunteers are assigned to what locations. One volunteer has her own night vision, so we put her at one of two sites that was completely dark, with no street lighting. That was a good call. In another case, we got lucky when we paired two volunteers that were not interested in sharing a vehicle, but both stayed in their own cars, out of preference. We wanted the volunteers to help keep each other awake, so in general, this isn't preferable -- for them to be in separate cars. But at their site, it happens that one needed to watch the street and the other needed to watch the park, which are in opposite directions. So their cars faced opposite directions, and it worked.

We had neglected to instruct each volunteer team to study the areas surround each of the five surveillance sites, which they would need to know in case a sighting came in to one, since we would want all teams to move to the sighting area to assist. We got a volunteer to stay by the phone and computer so that she would be able to help navigate anyone that called her, in the event of a sighting, to the sighting location. Now, I would always want someone on standby for this reason.

We set up a phone tree in the event that a sighting came in. The first person to call would be the dog's foster mom, with whom she had bonded. Then the sighter would call the person on the list to which he was assigned. This would be the passenger/non-driver in another team. That person would call the person to whom they were assigned, which was the passenger in another team. This would continue until everyone was notified and would be on their way to the sighting locaiton. We tested this, and thankfully so since one person's phone number, on the list, was his home phone not his cell phone!

No, we never sighted the dog that night. But my consolation prize was figuring a few things out about stake-outs that I hadn't known  before.