Ep 121: The Critical Role of Dispatch and 911
Episode 121
Published Mar 30, 2026
Duration: 34:45
Episode Summary
Dispatch isn't just a voice on the radio—it can make or break an active shooter response. In this episode we sit down with Bill Godfrey, Sheriff Kevin Beary, and Kevin Nichols to unpack why 911/dispatch is a true operational lifeline in modern critical incidents. For more information check out our white paper “The Critical Role of Dispatch and 911 in Hostile Event Management” on our website at https://ncier.org/research/white-paper-critical-role-of-dispatch-and-911-hostile-event-management.
Episode Notes
Dispatch isn't just a voice on the radio—it can make or break an active shooter response. In this episode we sit down with Bill Godfrey, Sheriff Kevin Beary, and Kevin Nichols to unpack why 911/dispatch is a true operational lifeline in modern critical incidents.
You’ll learn how dispatchers:
- Capture and organize fast-moving intel from panicked callers.
- Support initial law, fire, and EMS response with clear, prioritized information.
- Manage radio traffic, channels, and patches to keep everyone on the same page.
- Use tools like text-to-911, mapping, and recording systems to improve decision-making.
- Train, exercise, and integrate with field responders before a real incident happens.
We also talk about:
- Common gaps between dispatch centers and field command—and how to fix them.
- Policy, leadership, and staffing issues that directly impact survivability.
- Practical steps agencies can take right now to better include dispatch in their active shooter plans and exercises.
This episode is a must-listen for:
- Dispatchers/telecommunicators
- Law enforcement, fire, and EMS supervisors
- Chiefs, emergency managers, training officers, and other leaders
If you’re serious about improving active shooter incident management, you can’t afford to treat dispatch as an afterthought. Hit play to hear real-world lessons, hard truths, and simple changes that can dramatically improve outcomes in your next critical event. We also encourage you to check out our white paper “The Critical Role of Dispatch and 911 in Hostile Event Management” on our website at https://ncier.org/research/white-paper-critical-role-of-dispatch-and-911-hostile-event-management.
View this episode on YouTube at: https://youtu.be/a6kP61u4MMM
Transcript
Bill Godfrey:When you think about active shooter response, it's easy to focus on police and EMS. But there's another responder that all too often is overlooked, and that's today's topic. The critical role of dispatch and 911 and how they can save your
Welcome to the Active Shooter Incident Management Podcast. My name is Bill Godfrey, your podcast host. I am joined by two of my other instructors here at the National Center for Integrated Emergency Response. We have Sheriff Kevin Beary joining us back in the house again. Sheriff, good to have you back.
Kevin Beary:
Always good to be here, Bill.
Bill Godfrey:
All right. And then we've got retired Assistant Police Chief Kevin Nichols. First time on the podcast.
Kevin Nichols:
I am. Thank you guys for having me.
Bill Godfrey:
Well, welcome. Welcome. So, today's topic is the critical role that dispatch and 911 plays. And Sheriff, I know you for decades oversaw this in your organization. What are your opening thoughts here?
Kevin Beary:
Well, the 911 center is absolutely the heartbeat of any operation, whether it's critical incident situation or everyday 911 calls that come into the center.
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah, Kevin?
Kevin Nichols:
I agree. I agree with the sheriff. As you pointed out in the intro, the often overlooked, right, because they are a incredibly important, extremely important aspect of the response, but a lot of times we don't think about them. They're just there for us and they can really save you but a lot of times they get overlooked.
Bill Godfrey:
So when we talk about dispatch I think as you both mentioned we tend to overlook them not only as part of the response and part of the team but they're kind of the hub that holds this all together. You can have a lot of failures in a response but if one of them is on the dispatch side things are going to go sideways in a heartbeat.
Kevin Nichols:
A good dispatcher can absolutely save you, but a bad dispatcher can also ruin you. So, like you said, if you have that failure at that hub, if the middle of your response gets gummed up, it's going to cause you a lot of heartaches you don't need to have.
Kevin Beary:
It's also important for that dispatch supervisor to realize when it is time and she recognizes or he recognizes an incident, a critical incident is happening and they can adjust the resources to keep things flowing smoothly.
Bill Godfrey:
I think the other key element here that gets overlooked in terms of the management of these events is the value of dispatch as part of the intelligence hub of collecting information and organizing information. And I know that we talk about that a lot in the training that we provide, the exercises we do, and show people tips and tricks on how to do that integration. But how big a deal is that in real life when it gets overlooked? Kevin, what do you think?
Kevin Nichols:
I think that we all know the perfect example is the Aurora nightclub shooting in Colorado. Their call volume for that 2 or three hour incident was 150% of what their normal 8 hour shift was. So they're going to get a lot of information coming in and they're going to have access to information that we on the street or we on the scene aren't going to have. So having someone there that is competent and capable enough to go through that, know what's important, understand how it fits in with the response, and being able to get that information out to us in a timely manner is absolutely critical.
Kevin Beary:
And when that incident commander is on scene and his job is to get intel down range, that incident commander needs to start thinking about putting somebody inside the 911 center and also embed somebody at tactical so that they can get all the information possible so they get the big picture of what's going on.
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah, it's an interesting question and an interesting challenge for comm centers I think is how do you do your operational role as a dispatcher communicating on the radio taking the deluge of 911 calls. The information is being entered into the CAD system so fast the screen is almost at a constant steady scroll. How exactly in the middle of all that are you supposed to stop and go through the notes and look for those little nuggets and the gems?
And I I think that's one of the leadership challenges that that agency leadership needs to look at and talk to their comm center supervisors about to say, "All right, how are we going to get this done? Do we need to send an investigator here? Do we need to supplement the staff? Do we need..." What are your thoughts on that?
Kevin Nichols:
Well, you talked about supplementing the staff, and that was one of the things I was going to bring up is the idea of surge staffing in dispatch. If you have these critical incidents that we know are going to be a long-term event and it's going to be a huge response, active shooter traditionally brings a very large response and we have all these other agencies and all these other units that we normally don't have to deal with, having the ability to call in help and have people come help you to handle all those tasks, dispatchers that can run those tasks for you, I think is important. I think the sheriff also talked about the the staffing from somebody from the intel section.
Bill Godfrey:
Sheriff, but let me ask you this. You know, you're a leader, agency leader. You got a budget that you're responsible for. It's not like you can just have an extra dispatcher sitting on hot standby that can walk in there within 60 90 seconds of an event unfolding. How do you manage that as a leadership perspective?
Kevin Beary:
Well, most of the time you'll have a assistant supervisor or something like that at our dispatch which was co-located with Orange County Fire and they will pick up the call load. But you're also going to have to make some decisions when it gets overloaded like that. The the lower priority calls need to be set aside. They're going to have to wait because an active shooter is the top priority call. They're going to have to manage that call load.
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah. Interesting. All right. So, um, we kind of jumped in and talked about dispatch as the hub. But let me take us a step back. Let's talk about how the thing starts. You got your first arriving officer on the scene. They're going to be the first one to give any kind of in indication of what's going on. And it's kind of a two-way street here. We're looking for the officer to do a an LCAN report, locations, conditions, actions, needs. But as we've seen all too often under stress, that goes right out the window. How critical is that first size up report?
Kevin Nichols:
I keep using the word incredibly important, but it is. All of these are important parts, and that LCAN report paints the picture for everybody else that's coming afterwards. We always talk about how communications is one of the biggest failures on active incident responses on major incident responses. And a lot of times what you find is that it's not the equipment that's failing, it's the people who are failing. Either we're talking too much or we're not listening. And if we don't push out that LCAN, what's going to happen is every other unit responding to that scene is going to be calling in asking for it. Hey, what do you got? What do you got? What do you got? If we can push that information out early, it paints the picture for the entire response and saves you some air time.
Bill Godfrey:
Sheriff, when it comes to that first LCAN report, let's take the typical scenario that we all all too often see is the first officer under stress misses parts of it, either misses the size up report altogether or just misses key parts. How big a deal is it for the dispatcher to not only be able to step in and ask for what's needed and to know what they need to ask for, but also know that they have permission and authority from leadership to do it. How does that tie together?
Kevin Beary:
Well, I think that is a critical role of a dispatcher. That 911 operator and that dispatcher are going to be able to put all the dots together and even under stress, they are going to be able to document that incident, fill in the pieces and that information is going to be critical and I always try to downplay it a little bit. Take a deep breath when you're the first responder. Yeah, it's tough and you are going to be wound up tighter than the hatband, but the bottom line is that initial information is so critical. I'm in building five. Shots are fired. Sounds like a a handgun. Four injured in building five. I'm moving to building six. You know that information is building what we need to have so that we can get medical and everybody else there to start making decisions so we can stop the shooter and save lives.
Kevin Nichols:
And Bill, to your point about having permission or needing to take that role of asking for that, I worked with a lot of good dispatchers in my career and the one thing they all had in common or one of the things they all had in common was they understood they could ask for that and being able to, hey, I need this and also Sheriff talked about taking a breath. The idea of being that calming presence, right? A lot of times the guys on the scene are getting tripped out or getting spun up and having that that calm dispatcher be able to pull you back down a little bit is also important. I think.
Bill Godfrey:
I always found it fascinating when I would goof something up the many creative ways that dispatchers would find to tell me that I'd goofed something up over the radio without telling me that I'd goofed something up so that I could fix it. Is that your experience as well? They would find these delicate ways of reminding you that you forgot to do something you were supposed to do.
Kevin Beary:
Yeah. It's kind of like tiptoeing through the tulips. They did. And they also sometimes would tell me to make a phone call to the office and I talked directly to the supervisor said just be careful. That we've got it all captured and stay calm because they knew my Irish temper could get the best of me sometimes.
Bill Godfrey:
No, not you. Kevin, how about you? Has that been your experience as well?
Kevin Nichols:
So when I started my career, I started in dispatch and I started with another dispatcher. She and I were hired at the same time. And after I promoted to a first-line supervisor, at the time it was corporal and then we changed ranks to sergeant, when I was promoted to a my first line supervisor position, I worked on the same shift she worked. So, she was my dispatcher and we had come up together, so I knew her pretty well. And what she would do with me is anytime I got a little bit, got to be a little bit too much, she would call me sir, which she never does. So, anytime I heard on the radio that's clear, sir, I knew, okay, you need to chill out. You need to calm down and you're going to have to make a phone call later and square that away, cause she's going to she's going to have something for me later.
Kevin Beary:
And Bill, I would also say those dispatchers not only care about you, they worry about you. So, they're going to try to do everything they can in a positive manner to keep this thing flowing and cover everybody's tail.
Bill Godfrey:
And I think that kind of goes to the overall point here is that we are one big team and that the team doesn't work without this key resource, this key connector that makes all of this possible.
Kevin Beary:
Well, I also think that it's one of the reasons why our training is so successful. We ask in the class for five dispatchers. They are part of the role. They are part of the training program. And if your dispatchers and 911 people are not part of the training in a you know exercise, then you're missing the boat.
Bill Godfrey:
All right, let's shift gears a little bit. We're going to talk about the technology as it's changed over the last several years. So text to 911 has been implemented nearly everywhere. I suspect there's probably still a few agencies who don't have the text to 911 system working. But I think we're well over the 90% mark in the US. A lot of mandates and regulations about all that. What doors does that open for us in an active shooter event?
So, let's take a scenario where there's an attack at a school and you've got text to 911 capability. What's the kind of information other than the initial incident report that people could provide text to 911 to the comm center that's going to make a difference for us in the response? Kevin?
Kevin Nichols:
I mean, you look at there have been some recent active shooter events and when you're reading the after-action reports, you see that officers because we have done such a good job of training the standard response protocol and kids go into lockdown, locks, lights out of sight. So, we don't know which rooms are occupied and which rooms aren't. That was mentioned in a couple after action reports recently. Having someone, if the teacher can control it and have those students a few at a time get on the phone and text information to 911. I'm in this classroom. This is how many people we have in this classroom. None of us are injured. No bad guys in this room. And we do that throughout the building. Then dispatch becomes a repository for that critical information and can feed that to the incident command to help drive the response.
Bill Godfrey:
Sheriff, how big a deal would that be? You've got in each classroom one person that gets designated, either the teacher does it themselves or designates, you know, one student to send a text to 911 and say what room number they're in, how many people are there, and whether there's anybody hurt with them or any threat present. How, and then to get that report over 90% of the campus. How much of a game-changer is that for you in the command post?
Kevin Beary:
I think that's a serious game-changer because you're getting raw intelligence and you're making decisions on what you're getting from that text to 911. So, if they have that capability, use it because that helps the command decisions and also potentially could help us locate the suspect and save other lives.
Bill Godfrey:
And how much of a challenge is that going to be? I mean, we talked about the tech and this being a relatively new thing. One of the things that's not relatively new is the remote computer terminals that are in the vehicles or even on sometimes laptops and phones that can give people access to the CAD system and the CAD notes. So, how important is it for someone at the command post to get on one of those terminals and start going through and inventorying what's what's going on? How does that change things?
Kevin Nichols:
We talk about in the classroom about how we address the active threat first. And one of the things that drives us to the active threat is that actionable stimulus or actionable intelligence. So being able to access that actionable intelligence helps us with our first priority of dealing with the active threat. Having someone do that, we already talked about we've discussed the overwhelming deluge of information that's going to be coming into the dispatch center. And a lot of times those guys are overworked anyway. They're overworked and understaffed. And we talked about the challenges already about having the appropriate staffing. So being able to supplement that by having an intel section, somebody working on the intel section in the command post, even if the command post is your patrol car, like you said, I can access the information on my MDT. Having access to that information, having someone assigned to do it and go through it and find those that important information helps us prevent what the Sheriff was talking about and that critical intel being overlooked.
Kevin Beary:
And one thing I would recommend to agencies that are looking at purchasing command posts and things like that, you better have two or three computers and 911 centers inside that command post so that they are part of the command post and they can pull up what you're asking for right from the CAD system.
Kevin Nichols:
When we got our command post, we actually had it set up to where anytime that command post got deployed to an active scene, we brought a dispatcher with us specifically for that issue.
Bill Godfrey:
That's interesting. How big a deal is it that while you're trying to piece things together in the command post in the field, that dispatch as a collective comm center, so not the couple of dispatchers that are assigned to this incident, but the ones that are also working, you know, the rest of the area, the the other cities, the county jurisdiction, you know, whatever that may be. How big a deal is it that they're watching for other patterns to necessarily connect the dots? Here's the context of my question. We've seen this enormous rise of people fleeing the scene. And just because they flee the scene doesn't mean they're done killing and attacking. And in some cases, those those attacks become mobile. But as they're moving and potentially moving across jurisdictional lines from one city to the next, from one county to the next, how important is it for the dispatch centers to be watching for those patterns and asking the question, is this connected?
Kevin Beary:
Extremely important. And it's also important when those first responders get to the scene. If they've got information on the suspect and suspect vehicle, they have to get that to the dispatch so that they can put it out in a broadcast. And that's exactly what happened in San Bernardino in that particular incident. And when they were able to get that information out quick, other cops picked up on it. They had witnesses. They had information of a possible location. They went to the location and the suspects fled and they took care of business.
Kevin Nichols:
The other side of that, Bill, you kind of touched on it a little bit, is the affected dispatch center being able to reach out, whether that's by teletype or phone call or however that radio or however they do it to the surrounding agencies to let them know this is what we've got so that when those other agencies start getting suspicious person calls or matching description calls, things like this, that we can start piecing it together. The other side of that is what happened at Las Vegas where you had injured people, people who were injured at the Route 91 music festival going to different casinos and then calling for ambulances and you thought you had, they at one point thought they had shooters at several different casinos where they didn't and being able to vet that information and find out what's really actionable, what's really not.
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah. the idea of the ghost calls or the echo calls as they've as they've been so worded.
So obviously what we're talking about here is a very chaotic opening to a very critical incident. You know, we're looking for that size up report from that first officer. We're looking for the dispatcher to kind of pull it out of them if they don't think to give them some of the critical information. We're looking for the text to 911 information to start giving us a very quick picture of what's going on over the scene, but this is resource intensive. How important is it for a jurisdiction to sit down with their comm center and say, "Let's develop a standard response package. This many police, this many fire, this many EMS and when a call hits this level of severity, this nature of call, these types of calls, whatever the list is and say we are going to send this whole package at a minimum, how big a deal is that?
Kevin Beary:
I think we are there now. I think we have to start thinking in those terms just like the shooting recently in Austin. You know, they had a pre-deployed rescue task force. That's thinking out of the box. That's being proactive. And we have to do the same for the dispatchers in the 911 center.
Kevin Nichols:
I think the fire service has been doing that for a long time. It sounds very much like what you got you guys call box alarms where we have that pre-designated if you get this type of call, you get this type of response. And I think that that folds a lot into the Las Vegas MACTAC concept of you have stay-at-home units and you have responding units and that helps you if we're looking at the what's next. So we've got all the active shooter events and we look at Mumbai, we look at Paris and that complex coordinated attack where somebody has hit us and then are using our known weaknesses of over-convergence to affect the outcome in their favor. So having someone who can fix that and control it I think is important as well.
Bill Godfrey:
Now let's shift to the obvious one. What about the radio failures? "Communications was a problem" is a quote and I think it's in the standard boilerplate for every after-action report. I've never seen an after-action report that didn't say that they had communications problems. So let's kind of talk about the buckets that they fall into. So let's deal first of all with radio failures. How common of an issue is it? How do you work around it? How do you deal with it?
Kevin Nichols:
There was a recent report that I read on mass casualty incidents in the United States that said that the communications failure is always cited as one of the events in the after-action report. But radio failures, physical mechanical failures of the radio only happened in 5% of the cases. That's only 5% of the call out. 80% is human failure. If we're not listening, we're talking over each other, we're not operating the radio, we're on the wrong channel. So, it is a problem. Absolutely. But it's not always the mechanical problem that we like to blame it on.
Bill Godfrey:
And Sheriff, you've been around long enough that you've seen radio technology evolve just a little bit over time. And it used to be a real issue and a real gap in the past. You think that radio coverage, like Kevin said, equipment failures and radio coverage is the real issue that plagues us anymore?
Kevin Beary:
Well, I think Kevin said it, it's we get so wound up in what we're doing. We're trying to do our very best and they're, you know, the radio, they're on the radio, they're covering each other, they're not listening, they're not getting a response to make sure that critical information was received. So, you know, that's where you got to train, you got to get better at it. We watch it. The first scenario is always, pretty much a very interesting disaster, controlled chaos. But by about the third one, they're starting to pick up on the fact that they got to stay calm on the radio. Let's not bleed over on each other and walk on each other. And I think they get it. And I will also tell you that that is why you also need if you have critical incidents channels, you need to practice on those channels. If those channels are part of the mutual aid agencies, you need to involve them and practice because that's going to make sure that everybody knows how to get on those channels, make sure that they're all encrypted properly and what have you.
Bill Godfrey:
It's really interesting that he brings that up. I have seen more commonly than not that there are these shared channels across jurisdictions and they are almost universally called something different in each agency's radio. They're on my system it might be group C channel 10 but on yours it's in group B and on yours it's in group D. Completely different channels and a completely different name. Has that been your experience as well?
Kevin Nichols:
Yeah, absolutely. And then who owns the channel and who controls it and is it being metered and spun up and with us the agency that I worked in, the larger county owned a lot of the radio systems and for major events, we had to go through them to have those channels turned on and and metered up, right? So, in an unplanned event, that might be a challenge.
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah. Yeah. And then and I want to circle back, you mentioned encryption keys. That's one I've seen happen at every single exercise where we're using their real physical radios and they're trying to exercise their channels. There's always the well wait a minute what is that? Oh that's not called mine. And then you know one person who has the knowledge says oh that's on this group this channel it's called this and then they get switched over and half of them find out that they can't hear or can't transmit. It turns out the encryption keys got changed and nobody did an update.
Kevin Beary:
Oh, absolutely. That that happens and that's why you have to practice and train and you can't just do it one time because sometimes those things go bad by themselves. That's technology. So, you got to have the updates and they got to be planned updates.
Kevin Nichols:
We actually had that situation happen when we bought this training to my agency and we decided we wanted to test our radios as part of it and found out that our fire department radios were encrypted and our police department radios were not. So the fire department could hear us, we couldn't hear them and having to figure out number one, why is the fire department talking to me and I can't hear them and then having to fix that in training before a live event was incredibly helpful to us.
Bill Godfrey:
One of the other topics that often comes up with the radios and communications is well agency A couldn't talk to agency B. And 20 years ago that was a legitimate issue. Nowadays with technology and with the capability of patching I have not in the last 10 years, five years even, but certainly 10 seen a comm center that didn't have the capability to solve those problems. What I have seen continue though is a lack of political will from agency A to permit agency B to have its encryption keys and to be able to be on their channels and share their channels and things like that. And my sense is, and I'm curious what the two of you think, my sense is is that the ability to not talk to each other is not becoming, it's not a technology problem anymore. It is a human problem. It is a problem of people not doing what it takes to plan for these things ahead of time, agencies not cooperating with each other because of, you know, whatever reason. What's your sense of that? Where do you think we are today in terms of interoperability between agencies? Is it a technology problem or is it a people problem?
Kevin Nichols:
I think it's an ego problem. It is. It's a politics and ego problem and it's a funding problem because number one, you have to be able to you have to be able to play well in the sandbox together. So, we have to like each other and we don't necessarily have to like each other, but we are going to have to respond together. So, we should get along well enough to professionally respond to calls. Number one. Number two, having the technology, which compared to when we started is amazing, having the technology but not training on it is also incredibly a huge failure. If you know as a leader, if you're aware, as you should be, that communication failure is a problem and is likely to be a problem and a major response in your area and you don't do something to mitigate that beforehand, that's a failure of leadership.
Kevin Beary:
Well, I had to laugh. I love when you said egos, Kevin, because the bottom line is politics do get in the way. In today's day and time, if you don't learn to cooperate, that's the state police, that's the feds, that is local, that is sheriff's offices, everybody needs to be on the same sheet of music. And like I say right there in my opening remarks just about every time I when I give a class with you Kevin or Tom Billington or anybody else, bottom line is if you want to be the former chief of police, the former sheriff or the former fire chief, keep playing your stupid games, you need to get in the real world and start putting all egos aside and getting the damn job done.
Kevin Nichols:
One of the guys I used to work with a lot said, your ego is not your amigo. So just remembering that, right?
Bill Godfrey:
So both of you kind of touched on this earlier the importance of including dispatch anytime you're doing training and obviously we very much include them in all the stuff that we do but what are the kinds of things the day-to-day training where dispatch should be included so that both sides get a chance to practice to work through issues and to spot problems before they roll to the field.
Kevin Nichols:
Well, I take it even further than that, Bill. I think obviously anytime you're doing a training situation that's going to involve you talking on the radio, you should at least consider bringing your dispatch center into it, but they should also be involved in your pre-planning phase. If I'm doing a planned event and, you know, a SWAT hit or we're planning a parade or we're planning a you know, security for a festival, having someone from dispatch in there to speak to dispatch issues is important. But it's also important to have them there in the after-action reports. So when you're doing your debriefs or you're doing your hot wash, having somebody from the dispatch center come in, what did it look like from your side? What could we have done better for you and what could you have done better for us? I think is also, it's an often overlooked area that doesn't get hit a lot and has a lot of value for your agency.
Kevin Beary:
And one of the other areas that our class teaches is get the dispatchers some additional training for a hostage situation because a lot of times the hostage taker is the one that's calling the 911 center and there's opportunities for your own agency or FBI trained negotiators to come in and give that 8-hour course so that they've got some basics on how to deal with that type situation in a very critical incident in time.
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah. And not only will I echo that, but I'll also offer the NTOA, National Tactical Officers Association, has an excellent hostage negotiator training program, but one of their program, they have one for training negotiators, but they also have one for just training regular patrol level people that are not attended negotiators, but they have a one-day, eight hour online program, and it's like 30 bucks, that is there for all first responders including dispatchers. And so, you know, you talk about the ability to have that training available, it's there. It's readily available and a great great great program.
Sheriff, we were talking earlier about this and you made a really interesting comment about the value of dispatch and the records that they keep from a legal perspective after the fact. Can you tell everybody a little bit about that?
Kevin Beary:
Oh, absolutely. Your 911 center and your dispatch and your supervisor pay a critical role for your agency to defend itself. They gather all that information, they make copies, and it all becomes part of the defense package when other people try to go after you in a courtroom of law. And without that information, you're severely behind the curve.
Bill Godfrey:
So, you've got the CAD system, the CAD notes that they've put in, recordings, what kind of stuff really carries that weight?
Kevin Beary:
All of it even to the point where some even the handwritten notes from the initial call because that is all the information that's coming in and all that raw intelligence and it kind of paints the picture for the situation as it you know progresses.
Bill Godfrey:
All right, Kevin, any final words?
Kevin Nichols:
The thing that we have kind of touched on a little bit but I want to make sure that I cover is with our Active Shooter Incident Management Checklist. Incident Management Checklist. Those marks we train really hard on the responder side, the the fire, law enforcement,EMS side, but having the dispatcher be able to be trained in that as well to be able to call us and say, "Hey, nobody's assumed that tactical group supervisor position yet. We're seven or eight officers in. Somebody needs to do that." and assigning that could be incredibly helpful as well.
Kevin Beary:
And capturing those key critical benchmarks like you know command post was set up, staging is set up, first patient down, officer down. By capturing that information, that is all part of the overall plan and that'll not only defend you but also help you get through your exercise.
Kevin Nichols:
But they need to know what to ask for, right?
Kevin Beary:
Absolutely.
Kevin Nichols:
So having them there is incredibly helpful.
Bill Godfrey:
Great stuff. Gentlemen, thank you both very much for this. If you're interested in this topic and you want to learn more about this, dig deep into i,t or if you're an agency leader with responsibility over a communications and 911 center, I strongly encourage you to take a look at the white paper that we published a few months ago talking about the critical role of dispatch and documenting that. Our producer Karla is going to pop up a link on the video right now that you can click to go directly to that white paper. We're also going to put the link in the show notes. And until next time, stay safe.