Clearlake Police Department goes live as 911 public safety answering point
- Elizabeth Larson
- Posted On
CLEARLAKE, Calif. – On Wednesday, the Clearlake Police Department took a key step in its plans to improve services to the community by beginning its function as a primary public safety answering point.
Before Wednesday, when individuals dialed 911 in the city of Clearlake, their calls were routed to the Lake County Sheriff’s Office Central Dispatch for police matters and then transferred to the Clearlake Police Department.
The circuitous process included delays and prevented dispatchers from accessing automated caller location information, including from cellular callers, with dispatchers having to then ask more questions to know whether the call was for police or fire, the latter being relayed to Cal Fire’s St. Helena dispatch.
At around noon on Wednesday, the department eliminated that delayed routing process by switching to state-of-the-art 911 call handling equipment.
Now, 911 landline callers within the city will be directly routed to a Clearlake Police dispatcher, who will handle their calls.
The department said that, in the coming weeks, the system will be further enhanced to provide direct routing of most cellular calls.
The changes are the result of the department receiving the state’s designation as a primary public safety answering point, which the Clearlake City Council approved pursuing last September at Chief Andrew White’s request, as Lake County News has reported.
In October, the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, Public Safety Communications, California 9-1-1 Emergency Communications Branch notified the Clearlake Police Department that its application to become a public safety answering point had been approved.
As part of the state’s approval, it provided the Clearlake Police Department with $226,000, to be spread across five years, for the necessary equipment upgrades.
The department said callers in the city will benefit from the new system’s full 911 capabilities, including automated location and number information, rapid transfers to the fire/medical dispatch with accompanying location/number information, and TDD for communication with the deaf.
There are still more upgrades to come, with the department reporting that new text-to-911 functionality will be implemented in the near future along with even more robust technology for locating wireless callers.
Last week, Clearlake Police dispatchers received extensive training on the fully computerized new system, which the department reported is fully integrated with the computer-aided dispatch system and the computers in the patrol vehicles.
Another benefit of the new system is that it is hardened against situations such as downed lines or equipment failures with redundant links to the public safety answering points at the Lake County Sheriff’s Office and Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office.
In emergency situations, such as an evacuation of a public safety answering point, calls can be seamlessly re-routed to another public safety answering point, the agency said.
“We would like to extend our sincere thanks to the California 9-1-1 Emergency Communications Branch, Lake County Sheriff's Office, Motorola Solutions, RIMS by Sun Ridge Systems and AT&T staff who all made this possible. We would also like to recognize our employees who put in extra time and effort to remodel our dispatch center and prepare it for the new system,” the department said in a Wednesday statement.
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