1y ago

A dangerous Washington 911 staffing crisis was averted with a simple fix: remote work | Kitsap County, in Washington State, is the first to prove that 911 dispatchers can work from anywhere

www.fastcompany.com /91026136/911-kitsap-washington-bainbridge-island-staffing-crisis-averted-remote-work-tech

A dangerous Washington 911 staffing crisis was averted with a simple fix: remote work | Kitsap County, in Washington State, is the first to prove that 911 dispatchers can work from anywhere::undefined

14 comments

It's...phone call handling. What about that needs to be in a specific room?
- I work in a 911 dispatch center, were starting to do some remote trials, but I'm not part of the test group, so I'm not totally clear on all the details about how we're handling it.
  But some concerns I'd have are
  Backup power supplies, phone and Internet connections, etc. our dispatch center has massive generators, several redundant phone and Internet lines, etc. You wouldn't want to be on the phone with your call taker and have your call drop in the middle because there's a storm and they just lost power or Internet to their home.
  Radio equipment- phones and call taking are only half the game, the other half is on the radio with our field units. If somehow everything else goes offline, the dispatchers still have walkie talkies to communicate with the units in the field.
  Security concerns, both physical and cyber. We're handling a lot of sensitive information, have access to various local, state, and federal databases, etc. I'd be a little sketched out by some of that going over someone's home WiFi. Yes, you can do a lot with vpns and virtual machines and such, but it still introduces a whole lot of variables that need to be accounted for. Also if something really crazy happens, most dispatch centers are fairly secure places, I personally work in a underground bunker on the property of a prison, tall fences, armed security, multiple security doors, etc. You also have less control over who is in the room and what they're doing. We're not allowed to take any pictures or video in the room, some dispatch centers go so far as you can't have your cell phone out at all, no one can just walk in unless they have business in there, it's a pretty controlled environment.
  Physical proximity to other people is useful, we're always turning around and asking other people sitting near us for help with something or another, whether it's asking them to call another agency while we're on the phone with someone, look something up for us, asking them how to do something in the computer (there's a lot going on in our system, and they're constantly adding and changing how some things work, so I'm not sure anyone really knows how to do everything off the top of their head.) If our computer freezes up while taking a call, we can still yell across the room to the dispatcher that they need to send someone to a location because something is going on there (there's a famous story in our dispatch center from a few decades ago when we were first getting computerized where someone called in that a cop was getting beaten up and couldn't get to his radio, the person taking the call couldn't find the location in the system and had to yell over to the dispatcher for that zone to get backup started for him over the radio.) Also about half of us are working night shift and our hours are long, having people around you and keeping an eye on each other is some easy insurance to make sure no one's literally falling asleep on the job.
  Space for the computer equipment. Where I work, call takers have 5 monitors, dispatchers have 6, and we make use of all of them, we have a lot of information we're constantly shifting through, and all those screens are very useful to us, we could, in a real pinch, make do with 2 or 3 screens, but it would be a pretty big hindrance. I don't have space in my home to squeeze in a 5 or 5 screen setup, and I wouldn't really want to work without them long term (once in a while we've had to use aour backup center which has 1 fewer screen at each console, and it's a pretty big pain in the ass)
  Some of these are weird edge cases, but that's also kind of exactly the sort of situations that 911 exists for. I do think if done right working from home can add extra redundancy, hypothetically if someone blows up our dispatch center or something it's better if half of us aren't even in the building and can continue working, but on the other hand if there's widespread power and Internet outages, it doesn't do us any good to have half of our staff sitting at home in the dark either. There's a balance to be struck, I'm not totally sure what it is, but it's something that needs to be approached carefully to make sure we're still able to provide an acceptable level of service.
  
  Had the same question when I read the headline and this was super informative. Out of curiosity, do 911 operators have to pass extensive background checks and psych exams to be able to access those databases? Also, I've heard the pay was abysmal - is that still true?
  
  I have to imagine this is a stressful job that you can't really talk about with everyone and having other people physically present that can truly identify with the stuff that you have to deal with is psychologically important.
  
  To add to point 4 in small municipalities it's not uncommon that the dispatcher might also serve other roles like a notary or permit processor who have to be accessible to the department or the public.
- Stability, mainly power redundancy and physical security.
  And also ISPs are pieces of shit.
  
  Well, we could argue than having everyone in the same building is also a risk (traffic/weather issues could block all operators to come for example).
  So having operators dispatched in several towns with probably multiple Internet providers could reduce this risk. In case of real big crisis, I agree it's better to have everyone at voice reach, in the same room.
  But, while a global internet outage could be a real risk for operators at home, having everybody able to join from everywhere can mitigate that.
  And in case of a global internet disruption (another big risk that could happen), well classic mobile users would have also issues to contact 911 as lot of 4G/5G towers use internet instead of internally owned network to transmit our calls and data (the old copper landline disappear more and more).
  Note that I agree with yours points too, their is pro and cons everywhere :-)
- Well is it 911 call takers or dispatchers? Both police and fire radio rooms in this county are radio operators and it’s crucial that they operate in the building where the very large and high up radio antennae are. Radio operations from the ground can be spotty and difficult to parse especially during periods of heavy ducting.
  If you’re somewhere where you have jobs that just answer phone calls then I can kinda see it, but the rest wouldn’t be feasible from home.
- Some local knowledge is beneficial. For instance if the caller is trying to describe their exact location from descriptions. Like "I'm stuck under the benches at the statue at the madras store".
  It would be horrible if all 911 calls went through an Indian call center.
  
  It's useful, but a lot of places have a central dispatch that covers an entire county, or in some rural areas even a couple different counties. The center I work for covers almost 500 square miles and about 70 different towns, I've lived in this county my whole life, I know about half of the towns pretty well, the others not so much, and there's maybe about 2 or 3 that I'm genuinely not sure if I've ever even driven through them, let alone spent any time there, so any familiarity I have with them is only from my job.
  My personal familiarity with some areas does come in handy from time to time, but it's not absolutely necessary in most cases, you pretty quickly learn what questions to ask and how to use the tools that are at your disposal to work around the gaps in your personal knowledge.
After reading the article, the way they're doing it makes more sense than I initially thought. I supported a local dispatch office--or PSAP as they're typically called--for awhile and I was having a hard time picturing how a remote setup would work, given all the requirements that go into having a certified, regulation compliant PSAP.
Only a handful of their employees are remote, and the one that's fully remote outside of the county still had to complete their 4 months of training onsite before being able to work remotely. Additionally, their IT and radio techs, in conjunction with the dispatch software developer, had to rework all the software and hardware to work remotely. And lastly, the remote employee(s) seems to have to prove their Internet is fast and reliable; however, I'm not sure how they're verifying that requirement. It says their full remote employee in North Carolina rents a small, secure office, but I think he just does that because his house is very rural.
Anyway, the article headline is a little bit misleading. Kitsap 911 did a lot of amazing legwork in proving a hybrid model can work, and I'm honestly going to bring this up at the next meeting we have with our public safety folks (I no longer support them, but I still keep in touch with the teams that do). It's definitely exciting stuff, as the dispatcher staffing crisis is a real struggle for many counties in the US. It's a very stressful, demanding job that typically has long hours and is definitely not paid enough (which is likely the primary reason for staffing shortages).

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