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Pennsylvania to Consolidate Dispatch Centers

New regional centers will free law enforcement officials for public safety duties instead of manning dispatch centers

HERSHEY, Penn.-- Construction has started on the first of five statewide State Police Consolidated Dispatch Centers (CDCs) that will play a crucial role in the department's ambitious, ongoing project to use the latest computer technology to fight crime in Pennsylvania, State Police Commissioner Jeffrey B. Miller announced.

"Police dispatchers seated at high-tech consoles will be able to determine the location of patrol vehicles and direct troopers quickly to the scene of a criminal incident or traffic crash," Comissioner Miller said. "Troopers will have access to crucial information from their in-car computers while responding. This means faster response times and an enhanced level of officer safety."

Miller said ground was broken near Routes 39 and 22 in West Hanover Township for the Harrisburg CDC that is expected to open later this year. The center will serve stations in Adams, Center, Cumberland, Dauphin, Franklin, Fulton, Huntingdon, Juniata, Lancaster, Lebanon, Mifflin, Perry, Schuylkill and York counties.

Other CDCs are to be built in Norristown, Montgomery County; Greensburg, Westmoreland County; and at sites yet to be determined in northeastern and northwestern Pennsylvania. All five CDCs are expected to be completed and operational by 2006.

Miller said State Police dispatching now is done from all 81 of the department's stations, and about 173 troopers are needed to supplement civilian Police Communications Operators (PCOs) who work at those stations.

"By consolidating our dispatching functions, we can free those 173 troopers and assign them to the law enforcement duties for which they were trained," Commissioner Miller said.

The centers will have Automatic Vehicle Locator systems to pinpoint the location of each patrol vehicle and Geographic Information Systems that will aid PCOs in directing responding troopers to incident locations. "We're even placing local landmarks on the electronic maps to help our troopers navigate," Commissioner Miller said.

The CDC project is part of the wide-ranging State Police Criminal Investigative/Traffic Safety Incident Information Management System (IIMS) program. As part of the first phase of IIMS, mobile office computers were installed in all 1,200 State Police patrol vehicles. The second phase of IIMS includes centralizing the dispatching function, making the mobile office system fully operational, and implementing a new records management system that includes bar-coding technology for processing evidence and programs for identifying and mapping crime and crash trends.