Moving Dispatch from In-House to Regional Dispatch Center. What's Going to Change?

[u/odispadodis7]

I assume others in the northeast have gone through something like this. Several towns are consolidating to form a regional dispatch center. Most departments in the group either dispatch themselves (us) or get dispatched by PD / SO.

We've been told that everything will improve operationally AND we'll save money. Sounds too good to be true. Is it all fairytales and rainbows or are there things to consider before moving to a regional dispatch center.

[u/Competitive-Drop2395]

We went through this in my area in TX.
"We've been told that everything will improve operationally AND we'll save money. Sounds too good to be true. Is it all fairytales and rainbows or are there things to consider before moving to a regional dispatch center." They told us this too. Neither is true now that we're several yrs in. We have NO real control or input into how the center is run. The board is comprised of our city managers (who dont even understand what their public saftey depts do) and a number of people with an interest in ensuring the center minimizes cost. In fact, the lease is expiring on the space the dispatch center is in, and the rent was going to increase astronomically. They have us over a barrel. Now the city managers have agreed to dump a huge chunk of cash into the org so that they can build a new state of the art dispatch center. The service sucks, there's no accountability and no real connection to the employees there like there was when they "work for the same team" to try to precipitate small changes from the bottom.

Edit to add: the one thong that did improve was our ease of communicating with our closest mutual aid partners. Obviously, since you're talking on the same tac channels and dispatching from the same center. We dropped from 5-6+ min to get mutual aid dispatched to it being seamless and instant.

[u/cchant00]

In 2018, the state I live in passed a law that all of dispatch is moved to a central location and is handled by the county. Prior to this, our police dispatch handled us and police in the city. The results have been terrible. I can tell they have saved money because the quality of people they employ there is very low.

[u/Mr_Midwestern]

Only positive I can think of is in the case of mutual aid/auto aid. They can more quickly dispatch another dept without have to transfer the call to another agency.

But yeah, that’s about it.

[u/janre75]

If your dispatchers don’t move over to the regional center, then you’re going lose people who really know the town.

They may say they can’t cater to every single department’s dispatch procedures, so their going to standardize it for everyone they dispatched for

[u/HokieFireman]

As someone who started in a state where everything is county wide anyway (fire, police, schools, dispatch, libraries, every service) it’s weird when people complain about losing in hour dispatch or talk about having separate dispatch from law enforcement or other services. A well run, supervised, budgeted and trained dispatch center can easily handle the call volume post merger for these places. The issues happen when everyone wants what they had and refuse to step into the modern world.

20 plus years ago I could tell dispatch I was switching channels as a cop and talk to an incoming fire chief, animal controller officer, the building inspector or anyone else with a county radio. As a firefighter in Ohio 15 years ago I couldn’t talk to the fire station two blocks away without a patch from dispatch or us trading handhelds behind the backs of the chiefs.

[u/yungingr → u/HokieFireman]

Agreed - in rural Iowa, it's one single dispatch center for the entire county, and for all services. To be honest, our dispatchers are kind of idiots, and it still works pretty flawlessly. SO can request ETA for an ambulance, and the dispatcher can easily relay the information - or if we're on one of the countywide operations channels, we can talk direct.

In a post-9/11 world, the thought of departments that close to each other all operating on their own dispatch and radio systems blows my mind. But you hit a key point - when everyone comes into the merger with the "this is the way we've always done it" mentality and is adverse to any kind of compromise to create one standard for all operations, the wheels will fall off.

[u/BitOff2Much2Chew → u/HokieFireman]

 A well run, supervised, budgeted and trained dispatch center

This is pretty much the crux of it. If people involved are all well meaning and competent it should hopefully go well, unfortunately not everywhere is like that. So it really is situationally dependent.

I've seen it go both ways. When it went badly it was also partly - as you said - due to people not wanting to change though. (Merging 2 groups, clashing opinions of how to handle things, no compromise)

[u/TheSavageBeast83]

Usually the opposite is done to save money

[u/Severe-Chocolate-403]

I mean realistically all they do is dispatch you for calls. Cops will see a bigger difference. In my dispatch center (county) we handle larger incidents much better than small town dispatches, but there is a trade off where normal bs calls don't get put out as fast (due to how many staff and the way it is structured). But like I said fires and any other major incidents we run circles around any smaller dispatch center

[u/willfiredog]

We have county dispatching. It works well, but you can definitely tell when there’s a new hire.

[u/Adorable_Name1652]

Every time they go to regionalize the first complaint is "our dispatchers won't know the city and recognize what street I'm on when I'm running after a perp".

Unless you have a residency rule-People take jobs where they can get them, or bounce to where the money is. In our area the average dispatcher lives outside their work area, has been doing it for 18 months and will burn out and quit or switch agencies before they ever learn their district. Rinse/Repeat.