COLUMBUS – Columbus city officials say a six-week pilot program aimed at reimagining police response to 911 callers suffering from mental health and addiction issues yielded promising results.
Data collected over a span of 72 operation hours in June and July showed more than 60% of the calls received didn’t require immediate police or fire dispatch.
Nearly half of those calls were either fully resolved by the group of mental health professionals and dispatchers or were redirected to local community services…
The St. Joseph County 911 center says it’s in a staffing emergency right now– but, there’s help. Dispatchers are now getting 5% raises across the board and retention bonuses for staying on the team.
Leaders hope paying dispatchers more will help solve some of the problems.
The director says they’ve recently had several seasoned employees retire or move on to other jobs. It takes more than six months to fully train just one employee, so there’s no quick fix for short staffing either.
“It was a good idea to reward people for staying,” said Ray Schultz.
Two years after suffering communications outages that lasted anywhere from a few minutes to as long as 14 hours, Montgomery County’s public safety radio communications system received a major upgrade.
Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich held a news conference Thursday to highlight the features of the county’s $42 million system, which includes doubling the number of radio towers from 11 to 22…
Learn about current efforts to continue to protect the 4.9 GHz Band for public safety as well as recent filings, key decisions impacting these efforts, and how you can support PSSA’s initiative to protect the 4.9 GHz band for public safety.
