Agenda - 09-21-1993 - VII-A - Laserfiche WebLink

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2 MEMORANDUM TO: Orange County Board of Commissioners Joh Link, County Manager FROM:4 d Visser, Assistant County Manager DATE: September 13, 1993 RE: 911 Communications Group Meeting Last Friday, September 10, members of the Orange County 911 Communications Group met, with the primary subject of the meeting being the Computer Aided Dispatching (CAD) system that went on-line on August 19 . Participation at the meeting was excellent, with every County and municipal fire and law enforcement agency and the Orange County Chiefs ' Council represented. - It appears that certain procedural and software changes hold the potential for providing enhanced system capabilities that would benefit both field units and Orange Central Communications. Comments from several agencies indicated that the new system' s reporting configuration is causing problems in ready retrieval and producing hard copies pertaining to some incidents. The overall system incident numbering method does not guarantee each agency that its incidents will be reported in the chronological sequence in which 911 calls were received. As it is now programmed, the system generates reports based on a systemwide dispatching incident number. In addition, an agency specific reference number is manually assigned to each incident by the dispatcher. For various operational reasons, such numbers may be manually assigned within seconds or in a matter of hours. All agencies indicated the desirability of the system automatically generating an agency specific incident number as soon as the call is routed to a specific agency. That step would ensure sequential numbering of incidents and much easier record keeping. Consensus also indicated the desirability of having all reports based on the time the 911 call is received. Several agencies suggested that the system should provide a print screen capability that would enable the telecommunicator to print all the pertinent information about an agency incident and set it aside for later review by the agency. This might provide some short-term help to field agencies, at least until other reporting enhancements can be pursued. It appears that with the existing system set up, dispatchers must leave their active screens and call up files to respond to field officer requests for information pertaining to earlier incidents. This, along with the sheer volume of calls, seems to account for more frequent requests since CAD went on line from telecommunicators to field officers to "standby" . Another possible improvement in software would give the dispatcher the ability to assign the call to an agency without waiting to assign it to a specific unit. At present, the system does not register a dispatch as