Public Safety Groups Question E911 Achievements > Ehhh-9-1-1 -- Believe it or not, it's a take-it-or-leave-it

reply to marigolds

Re: Ehhh-9-1-1 -- Believe it or not, it's a take-it-or-leave-it

It might be peculiar to our area (we have 91 munis in our county), but it seems common to have multiple dispatches per routing center. Technically, every dispatch is a psap, but not every dispatch is employing all the technical staff to handle e911 requirements, phase 2, etc (I also think that, in our case, not every dispatch is in NENA either as a result).

reply to funchords
I found that a little puzzling, too. My experience is in urban areas, and the overwhelming tendency there is for PSAPs to be self-contained dispatch centers. In one room will be complaint takers and dispatchers for police, fire, and paramedics for one or more cities.

I believe a few fire departments in very large cities have managed to hold out and still make their separate dispatch center the PSAP for the city. If no fire response is required, a call is just transferred to the police dispatch center.

Yeah, we are quite different. Police, fire, and EMS all have different dispatch centers. County police takes all of the calls and then routes them to the correct dispatch center. None of the other dispatch centers take calls directly.
Fire has 44 dispatch centers; EMS technically has 46 (but actually has significantly less than that since two contract ambulance companies are covering multiple ambulance districts); and police has 63 dispatch centers. All the calls though go through county police initially. Yes, our CAD system is a little complicated and our vendor probably hates us.
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As an update, I found out today that tomorrow we will now have 43 fire districts and 64 police districts (though the number of police districts will change again in September).

reply to marigolds
Is complaint entry (into the CAD) done at the county, or at the individual dispatch centers?

Well, the political structure of St Louis goes back to the civil war, and was heavily influenced by the Jim Crow era (when a whole bunch of cities incorporated solely for the purpose of banning blacks from living in them).
Once you put 91 municipalities into such a small place, cooperation is pretty much impossible.
Police is almost a full cooperation though; it's really only the larger muni departments that do their own entry.
Of course, the city of st louis seceded from the county a long time ago, so their government, as well as all emergency services, are completely separate from the county.
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