SOFTWARE WILL AID IN DISPATCHING

A new software upgrade for the computer-aided dispatch system at the Cape Girardeau Police Department will computerize report taking at the Cape Girardeau Fire Department.

The software will also permit city police cars to be dispatched quicker, if only by seconds.

"It will certainly cut down on the amount of time required from the time the call is actually received to the time the call is dispatched. But we're talking by ... a few seconds," Cape Girardeau Police Sgt. Carl Kinnison said.

Assistant Fire Chief Max Jauch said he and fire department secretary Carol Carter received training on the upgrade Tuesday. Communicators at the police department received training Monday, said Kinnison. The police department dispatches the fire department on its calls.

The training was provided by a training coordinator for Business Information Systems of La Crescenta, Calif., Kinnison said. He said the city purchased the software for the computer-aided dispatch system from the company in 1987. The cost of installing the upgrade is $1,500, he said.

Kinnison said use of the software upgrade is on hold for now. The city's computer system, he said, is getting a hardware upgrade and it won't be until mid-February before the new system can be on-line.

The upgrade will allow computerization of the fire department's report taking, just as at the police department. Currently, the fire department takes its reports manually, Jauch said.

Kinnison said when a call comes into the police department, various information such as the location of the incident and the type and time of the call is entered by a communicator into the computer-aided dispatch system. The information is later pulled over to the police records component, and any additional needed information is added, he said.

The software will give the fire department the same capability, he said.

Jauch said the fire department will be able to call a person on computer by name.

"If we have a person involved in several fires, it's going to give us that information with just a few flicks of the button, whereas before it took days of just looking," Jauch said. "We'd have to go back manually and look through all our fire reports."

Jauch said that scenario could include someone a property owner or tenant involved in possibly three different fires. Such a scenario has happened in the past, but is "the exception to the rule, rather than the rule," he said.

Jauch said he didn't know how much time would be saved on each individual fire report. The department, he added, is looking at a lot of variables down the road, such as the use of printers.

"Myself and Carol have been working on this project since back in 1988, and we're ready to get it on-line," he said.

In the case of the police department, Kinnison said, the system, based on the type of call, will automatically recommend to communicators which police units to dispatch. The system will speed up the process, he said, because the communicators won't have to make the decision.

"Plus it eliminates the need to actually type the units into the system," he said. "It brings up the units, and of course the dispatchers have the discretion of declining what the computer recommends. But typically they will accept it and then it's a matter of hitting one key on the keyboard and the cars are dispatched."

The upgrade is important, Kinnison said, in situations when a communicator isn't familiar with a particular street or doesn't know what patrol zone a location is in. "This eliminates the need for them to search either manually or to find someone who knows where that location is before they dispatch the car."

The city has tenured communicators, Kinnison said, but it takes a lot of time to become familiar with the city's streets and geographic areas. In a life-threatening situation, he said, a communicator wouldn't worry about looking up a location. The communicator would just dispatch police cars to that location, he said.