MICHAEL SPATH, COMMUNICATIONS MANAGER INTERVIEW BY RYAN LIU AND SAURAV GANDHI Q: We’d just like to start by asking you to explain a little bit about what you do here at DPS? A: I have worked at Sunnyvale for 19 years now, I've been the communications manager for the past five, before that I was a senior dispatcher for a number of years, and before that I was at San Jose. Q: How does your average day go like? A: I come in and catch up on some emails that I get on through the night that I need to reply to, checking time cards, checking scheduling issues, scheduling training, coordinating all the different administrative stuff that happens over the dispatch center. I also check in with the dispatch center to see how they're doing, and just basically saying “Hi” to my dispatchers and the dispatch team, but they know that I'm there if they need me. Public safety dispatchers can be assigned to phones (primarily a call taker), but they can be assigned to the police radio or
fire radio, depending on what's happening at any given momentthose assignments can change. A fire call can come in and all the assignments switch because the call taker took the fire call, and now the call taker is dispatching the fire department and it's all very fluid. But if I'm assigned to phones for the day, I'm answering the telephones, I’m answering the 911 calls, I’m answering the non-emergency lines, and answering all 10 digit emergency lines which are basically alarm companies calling due to a burglar alarm. That’s what I would do most of the day. The fire dispatcher dispatches the fire department's fire calls or medical calls, and they also serve as a backup to the patrol dispatcher. Patrol dispatcher is dedicated to the police channel, police tends to be a lot more proactive and in that they're out and they can make a car stop, they can create radio traffic with a fire department, and to be more reactive you don't have fire engines driving around looking for fires near the fire station. So the fire channel can be a little bit easier to manage the
radio traffic so they serve as a backup to the patrol dispatcher. Q: What are some of the projects that the Communications/Dispatch department of Sunnyvale DPS is working on? A: Text-to-911. So, text-to-911 is a nation-wide effort now. But, Sunnyvale and Santa Clara are the two cities that have it now in the county. This platform is internetbased, so if you were to use that cell phone there and text-to-911, it would hit a cell phone tower here in Sunnyvale. That tower would run its program to say “here’s a text message to 911, and is Sunnyvale available?” We have gone live, so it would go to the web-based interface that sits on our workstations, so we’d get a little alarm that would notify when a text came in, and we would communicate from there. It's another avenue for people to contact us. It provides a level of redundancy, 911 can have an outage, you can't have the phone systems go down, you can have fiber cuts and all sorts of different things that can affect 911. This provides another pathway into our center. Generally
● Interview: Michael Spath, Communications Manager
STEMATIX Magazine
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