Duty Line HQ FAQ

Duty Line HQ is a complete notification system for police departments, with detective on-call scheduling and duty-line routing built in. Supervisors call out any unit and watch who's coming, live. Detectives get one duty-line number that always rings whoever is up, and an on-call schedule they can trade themselves.

A supervisor fills in a short template with the address, what happened and a map pin. Each person on that template gets a phone call that reads the call-out out loud, then a text with a private link to the details. Everyone answers Responding, No response or Other, and the supervisor sees each answer as it comes in.

Duty Line HQ follows up for you. After about 2½ minutes, everyone who hasn't answered is called and texted again. After about 5 minutes, the backups are called and the supervisor is told. It stops as soon as someone marks Responding. The times are department settings.

It's one phone number anyone in the department can call to reach the detective who's up. It rings every detective on duty first, then the on-call detective, then the duty-line backups, and keeps going until someone presses 1 to take the call. A personal voicemail can never grab a duty call. If the caller hangs up first, whoever is up gets a missed-call text with the number.

No. The duty line is for dispatch, officers and partner agencies. Duty Line HQ isn't a replacement for 911 or a department's dispatch.

Schedule admins, such as the detective sergeant, set the on-call week. Detectives can swap whole days or cover a few hours for each other on their own, and every change is logged with who made it. It handles the end-of-day logoff, the morning hold-over, and weekend and holiday handoffs automatically. Schedule admins get a text 72 hours before any day with nobody on call.

Yes. Any group can be made a team. An authorized activator types the location and one message, and every available member gets a phone call and a text with the address and a map link. Members press or reply 1 for responding or 2 for not, and they're called again every 2½ minutes until they answer. A live board shows who's coming. Team members, including people from partner agencies, don't need the app; they only need a cell number on the roster.

No download from an app store is needed. Duty Line HQ opens in the phone's web browser and can be added to the home screen like an app. It works on any smartphone.

Officers enter their cell number and get a six-digit code by text that expires in 10 minutes. There are no shared passwords to hand out, forget or reset.

No. The text only says there's a call-out and includes a private link. The address and details stay behind that link inside Duty Line HQ.

Data is stored on Cloudflare and encrypted on disk, and call-out details, texts and comments are also encrypted by Duty Line HQ with its own AES-256 key. Every incoming call and text is checked as truly coming from the phone service, and each department's data is kept separate. There's a full backup every night plus 30 days of point-in-time history.

Every call (including who was rung, round by round), text, call-out, answer, schedule change and setting change is logged with a name and a time. The log has filters and search, can be exported to CSV, and each call-out prints as an incident report with a map and full timeline.

The line calls itself every morning as a self-test, and health checks run every 5 minutes. If the app can't be reached, calls go straight to the backups' phones. If the phone service itself is down, supervisors get an email with the direct cell number of whoever is up.

No. Duty Line HQ runs in the cloud. Each department gets its own phone line, set up by CopBuilt, and an administrator adds people to the roster. Most departments can be up and running in an afternoon.

A department administrator adds a staff member's cell number only after that person agrees to receive duty-line calls and texts. Anyone can reply STOP to opt out or HELP for help. See the SMS terms for details.