April 8-14 2018, National Public Safety Telecommunicators Week

This week, we would like to recognize Public Safety Telecommunicators across the Country for their hard work behind the scenes!

As for your local Public Safety Telecommunicators, Indian River County has three 911 Dispatch Centers:

• Vero Beach Police Department
• Indian River County  Sheriff's Office
  • Fellesmere Police Department and Indian River Shores dispatch from the Sheriff's Office
• Sebastian Police Department

These three centers work together to ensure that everyone in Indian River County has access to emergency services. If one of the dispatch centers goes offline, the remaining ones automatically get their calls and can dispatch out their calls by working together.

To give you an idea of the amount of work that goes into this, here are some stats just for the Vero Beach Police Department, which only covers about 2% of the land area of Indian River County:
(data for 1/1/2018 - 4/9/2018)

• 14,234 Phone calls into Dispatch, 911 and non-emergency.
  • This does not include Radio traffic, or Officer Initiated events
• 12,576 Calls for Service
• 1,170 Cases assigned
• 2 Dispatch Personnel per shift, 1 call-taker 1 dispatcher.
• 280 Car Crashes worked
  • For some reason, Tuesday is the busiest day for crashes!

As you can see, they stay busy all the time!

You can also watch this video to see how a typical Dispatch center works, it was created by the City of Edina, MN and it is awesome!  Our dispatchers currently have (6) monitors to keep an eye on!

So if you know anyone that works as a dispatcher, give them your thanks next time you see them for the hard work they do to keep this system running!

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On April 3rd, The City of Vero Beach issued a Proclamation to the dedicated dispatchers of the Vero Beach Police Department proclaiming April 8th through April 14th as "NATIONAL TELECOMMUNICATORS' WEEK".