Victoria PoliceCommunications and Privatization
by Gary Clapham
| Gary Clapham is a Senior Sergeant stationed at the Victoria Police Communications Division. He has been a member of the Victoria Police for 25 years and has had service in Uniform, Undercover, Traffic and Water Police. He has been stationed in Communications for the past two years. |
| Sidebars: 9-1-1 Communications in New South Wales Intergraph's Privatized PSAP Community Policing in New South Wales |
| Related Articles: New Zealand Police Tasmania Fire New South Wales Fire |
| Photographs: (select thumbnail to view detail image) |
Members of the Victoria Police Mounted Branch on patrol in Melbourne. Victoria Police |
Senior Constable Stephen Evans with poice dog Jess. Victoria Police |
| This article can be found on page 36 of the July/August 1998 issue of 9-1-1 Magazine. |
Victoria, one of the seven states that make up Australia, covers some 87,876 square miles and is ten times the size of New Jersey. With over a quarter of Australia's population residing in the state, the Victorian Police Force serves approximately 6 million people of which some 4 million reside in Melbourne, the state capital. The Victoria Police Force is one of the largest police forces in the world with some 10,000 sworn officers and a civilian support staff of over 1,600.
Unlike the USA we do not have individual police forces covering a town, county or district, but have an Australian Federal Police Force who enforce federal legislature and each of the States has their own State Police Force who can enforce both State and Federal legislature.
In Victoria, in addition to the police force, we have two firefighting services, the Metropolitan Fire Brigade, a professional brigade which covers the City of Melbourne, and the Country Fire Authority, part professional and largely volunteer, which covers the rural communities state wide. The Metropolitan Ambulance Service provides immediate first aid, paramedic service, and transport for victims to hospital; in the rural area this is provided by Ambulance Service Victoria. The only other emergency service is the State Emergency Service. This is a largely volunteer service which provides manpower and equipment for all sorts of disasters such as floods, bushfires or other critical incidents such as lost hikers or skiers.
Up until 1995, each of these organizations managed their own communications centres, staffed under their own command umbrella by either sworn personnel or civilians. In 1995 our government decided to outsource all emergency service communications and reduce the number of emergency service control and communications centres by centralizing all emergency service communications into two separate communications centres. They also decided to outsource the staff for both centres which would return a large number of operational members back into the field. In our case it released approximately 250 police officers back into operational duties.
Today, all emergency service communications are run by a private company and the staff, including call takers and dispatchers are employed by that company. This company was set up in 1995 and has a seven year contract with an option to renew. Police have no line command or control over the staff, unless there is a failure to meet the Customer User Requirements (CUR's) set in the contract between the police and the private company.
How does Victoria's Emergency Communications work?
Australia has in the past few years privatized it's telephone services; however the emergency telephone number 0-0-0 (our equivalent to 9-1-1) remained with the original government provider Telstra. All calls from the public are received by Telstra and an operator will ask the caller which emergency service is required: police, fire or ambulance. A management system identifies the location of the caller and insures that the call is forwarded to the correct State Emergency Communications Centre (SECC). It is not unusual for a call originating in Melbourne to be answered by a Telstra operator in Sydney or Brisbane, some thousands of miles from where the assistance is required. All 0-0-0 calls have Caller Line Identification (CLI) and are then routed to the appropriate SECC. We also have an additional emergency number 11444 which routes directly to the SECC. This line does not have CLI and we are trying to discourage it's use as an emergency number. We do not at this stage have a non emergency number and it is hoped that 11444 will be used for this in the future. (Similar, as I understand, to 3-1-1 in the USA)
In Victoria there are two privatized SECC's run by Intergraph Public Safety. One centre is situated in Burwood, an eastern suburb of Melbourne and covers the Melbourne Ambulance Service and the Metropolitan Fire Brigade. The Country Fire Authority is due to come on line at this centre in the near future. The Victoria Police and the State Emergency Service are run from the Victoria Police Centre in Melbourne. Each centre has been designed to act as a redundancy for the other in event of a failure of some kind. In the past two years the Burwood Centre has lost power on two occasions and the standing plan has had to be activated.
The police SECC handles approximately 3,200 calls per day. Not all these calls are emergency calls as the public uses both 0-0-0 and 11444 to call police; few know their local police station telephone numbers. Melbourne is divided into 11 districts, each based on a geographical area. Normally a single dispatcher will cover each district, although at quiet times two and sometimes three districts will be patched together. Likewise, during busy periods a dispatcher may be given an assistant radio operator to ease the work load. Staffing and the decision to patch is that of the private company. Each district has its own radio channel frequency and there are additional frequencies available for tactical or special use.
The SECC includes a Police Operations Centre (POC) which is outfitted with a number of CAD/Radio dispatcher terminals. This is brought into use during planned special events such as the running of the Australian Grand Prix or during demonstrations or protests. It is also activated for unplanned events such as disasters, bush fires or terrorist incidents. The decision to open the POC and the use of tactical radio channels is that of a sworn officer, and the POC will be staffed and operated by sworn police members. In this case the private company has no say.
The company running the Centre and CAD system is merely a message-taking and passing service. They are not permitted to give advice to callers. As jobs [calls] arrive at the centre, they are prioritized according to the task and the company is required to dispatch them according to time constraints. For example Priority 1 jobs such as armed robbery and assault require a dispatch within 190 seconds, Priority 2, such as motor car accidents, person trapped: 320 seconds; Priority 3, such as cold burglary, willful damage: 480 seconds; and Priority 4, such as administrational messages, have no time constraint. This has created a number of problems both in the quality and quantity of information being obtained by calltakers prior to dispatching the job - with time becoming more important than the information received.
We have carried out research into a structured calltaking system to ensure that vital information is not missed in the speed to dispatch a unit. Those systems available commercially did not seem to be suitable for our needs and we have designed our own which is to be trialed as a pilot during May, 1998. One of the advantages of a structured call taking system is that we can run a quality review on a sample of the calls received as the system can be measured against a performance standard.
Where to from here?
As with many police forces worldwide, the cost of providing a service to the community with an ever-decreasing budget is a real juggling act. The requirement to send sworn police officers to every incident can no longer be justified and to this end we are looking at an alternative or differential response to some calls. For example complaints of a minor nature in which there is little or no chance of solving the crime could be dealt with by forwarding the call to a reporting desk where the reports can be taken over the telephone instead of dispatching a police unit. From a management and crime recording point of view, a statistical picture can still be gained, crime patterns worked out and operations conducted from these results without having what is increasing becoming a scarce resource, the sworn officer, attend to minor tasks. This concept also requires a cultural change by both police officers and the public who more often than not expect to have a uniformed police officer attend their particular problem. At this time, this system is not in use in Victoria although it is being investigated at length and we may see it in the near future.
Changing police culture and habits has always been difficult, but I must say that after nearly 3 years we have ironed a number of the bugs out. Status reporting, stolen car checks, checks for warrants and wanted people still tie up air time. The average channel has 40-50 units working at any on time which gives each unit a little over one minute per hour talk time on the radio. Event or job stacking often sees units with up to 10 jobs on their plate and in spite of priorities being allocated by CAD, the operational unit will still decide which of their jobs has the highest priority.
The use of Mobile Data Terminals (MDT) will improve this situation but is still some two years away. They are to be portable laptops which can be removed from the vehicle and taken into a crime scene. All reports will be directly entered onto the laptop at a scene and when returned to the vehicle will digitally down load the information into the crime reporting network. This will reduce the amount of time currently wasted by officers in taking information by hand and later filling out the numerous forms and faxing them to a reporting centre, where they are then loaded by hand onto the crime reporting network. The productivity and cost savings is estimated at $30,000,000 per year. Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL) is also expected to assist in a more efficient use of resources as well as reaction times to critical incidents being improved with the nearest unit being dispatched.
From the private company's perspective, they must make a profit to exist. They have a contract with the Government and are meeting their contractual arrangements. Any variations to that contract to improve the service or to alter procedures that were not considered when the project was first undertaking require additional payment above the contractually agreed amount. I must say that the company has worked very hard to have the system work and a number of changes have been made at no cost to the department to improve work practices that were not originally identified as having problems.
Finally, what do I think? I believe that the concept of a privately run communications centre has merit. The requirement for upgrading hardware, the training and provision of staff and day to day running of the centre is an expensive exercise that can reduce the service the department provides for customers. These costs are now met by contractual arrangement with the private service provider. While the department pays a fee for the service, it is in productivity that real saving is made.
