Sheriff’s officers need more information than they were getting from dispatchers at the Jasper County 9-1-1 center so the Jasper County Sheriff’s Office will spend $587,000 to build its own dispatch center.
Jasper County Sheriff Archie Dunn said he’s not replacing the Jasper County Emergency Services Dispatch Center, but he needs more control over the information flowing from callers to the officers.
“I’m not establishing a PSAP,” Dunn said. “I’m establishing a law enforcement communications center, I’m not in the business of taking the 9-1-1 calls. I am not thoroughly convinced it would be legal or proper for me to set my communications center in the Emergency Services Board’s center because I don’t know that the people who voted for that center would really want and I don’t know if the statute really allows for that, I haven’t gone that far into the research but it many be that it actually shouldn’t be.”
Dunn said he’s purchasing a computer aided dispatching system that will provide more information about past calls from a specific address to let an officer know before he gets out of a car what has happened at that address in the past.
“This is all built into the new budget,” Dunn said. “With the law enforcement sales tax that was passed a few years back, it has allowed me to do a lot of things and certainly this is one of them. I have never complained about the price I was paying for dispatch services but I was getting what I was paying for. It’s going to cost more money and it doesn’t matter where I put the dispatch center I’ve still got to buy almost everything except some of the furniture.”
Dunn said he’s spending a total of $587,271.56, including $388,252.56 for 10 new dispatchers and benefits and $199,019 for new radios, computers and other equipment.
Since 2004, the Sheriff’s Office has been paying $110,000 a year for dispatching from the 9-1-1 dispatch center near the Cedar Road interchange with U.S. Highway 171.
Dunn said he doesn’t have a problem with the price he’s been paying to the dispatch center, but the service the department has been getting is not tailored to law enforcement needs.
“I believe when (9-1-1 dispatchers) find out it’s a call that we’re going to handle, it should immediately be transferred to us,” Dunn said. “If they want to stay on the phone and complete their paperwork by listening to my dispatcher and the person calling in, fine. The sooner we can transfer those calls, the quicker the response will be and if it operates the way I would like to it might be a quicker response for us over the way they are doing business now.”
Dispatch Center Board President Kelly Stephens, who also works as the chief deputy sheriff under Dunn, said the dispatch center will have to cut some dispatching position but they hope to make those cuts through attrition rather than layoffs.
He said the center itself won’t be harmed by the change. He said dispatching calls for the sheriff’s office was costing the center more than the $110,000 they were receiving annually in payment.
Both Stephens and Dunn said having an additional dispatch center is not a waste of money because the sheriff’s and police department dispatch centers and the 9-1-1 center fulfill different missions.
“This is a place for 9-1-1 calls to come to,” Stephens said about the Emergency Services Dispatch Center. “The sheriff’s office had dispatching long before, Joplin’s had dispatching long before, Webb City, Carthage, Carl Junction, they’ve all had their own dispatching. It’s important to each one of those entities that they have some kind of control on how the call comes in to them and how that gets out to their people. When you or other people say you’ve got three dispatching centers in the county it’s comparing apples to oranges, it’s not comparing apples to apples.”
