Clinton County Central Dispatch Director Renee Crick on Monday released her department’s 2018 statistics and highlights to the Clinton County Commissioners.
During 2018, Dispatch actually had a decrease in calls for service. Their total 911 calls were down by 4% with a total of 15,684. As reported in the past, people are doing away with the traditional landline and going to total wireless calls.Crick said 86% of all 911 calls received were wireless calls and added their total administrative calls were 49,321 which also saw a decrease of 12% from last year. The total dispatched calls for 2018 was 37,438 showing a decrease of 2%.
Crick said they continue to utilize their TexTTY. They sent a total of 992 texts from 911 and received 76 texts to 911. In August, Indiana State Treasurer Kelly Mitchell visited the dispatch center. She was a month-long tour of visiting the top 25 PSAP’s in the State for utilizing Text to 911. Dispatch continues to promote this service as another means of communication in an emergency.
Nixle subscribers have grown to over 8,100. The subscribers choose to receive mass notifications via text and or e-mail. All Nixle alerts are immediately posted to the center’s social media accounts with Facebook and Twitter.
Crick said she is excited to say their revamped hiring process and testing program that was started in 2017 and continues to be successful. They ended the year with being at full staff. Crick added they truly have a great group of men and women. She believes they will continue to grow and learn as a department with continued training and new tools to assist them in their day-to-day job duties.
Dispatch’s newest tool in 2018 was the purchase of their Total Response call Handler along with the Spillman Interface. The call handler works in conjunction with their Spillman CAD. The Call Handler will automatically open up based off of a particular call nature. The questions and pre-arrival instructions for calls are then integrated into Spillman.
The questions we ask and the answers we receive are available to our public safety responders to see as they are enroute to calls. Crick believes having these tools will continue to allow them to provide the best service to the community and provide more consist call handling.
Crick also said they purchased light towers for each of their four consoles. The light tower will assist in knowing what each dispatcher is doing. The green lights shows a dispatcher is on the phone. The yellow light designates that the dispatcher is keying up and talking on the radio. These two lights are done automatically. The final light is a red light which is manually turned on by a dispatcher. The red light flashes and when turned on is to be used to notify other dispatchers they need assistance without them saying anything. The lights have been especially helpful when they have people coming in and out of the center.
Last year due to staffing shortages they were not able to attend as many training’s as Crick had hoped. Their goal for 2019 is again to be able to attend specialized training to continue to grow and stay up with the ever changing times they deal with in their line of work. The Statewide 911 Board began assisting departments last year with funding several trainings included their EMD, Fire Certification and Law Certification. By them assisting with those expenses it allows Dispatch to focus on other courses.