A Fire & Police Dispatch Upgrade: CentralSquare & The City of Dallas

With multiple public safety departments serving more than 1.3 million residents, Dallas needed a CAD system that offered interoperability and could adapt to changes in technology.

City of Dallas’ Challenge

The Police and Fire Departments of the City of Dallas had been operating on an old mainframe computer-aided dispatch system (CAD) known as LINC since 1978. Originally written in COBOL and ASSEMBLER development languages, the system became cumbersome and expensive to maintain. The systems were two separate CAD systems, a Fire CAD and a Police CAD, with limited ability to communicate with each other.

As the eighth-largest city in the nation with a population of more than 1.3 million, the City of Dallas was seeking a state-of-the-art CAD system to provide interoperability between essential city services and other jurisdictions in the region. The city desired a police and fire dispatch system that would support modern mainstream technologies and client-server technology and serve the current and future needs of the Police, Fire, Public Works, Code Compliance, Water Utilities, and Street Departments.

CentralSquare’s Solution

After a thorough evaluation of solutions, the Dallas CAD committee selected both CentralSquare CAD Enterprise and CentralSquare Mobile Enterprise to improve public safety and emergency management operations.

With CAD Enterprise, the various Dallas public safety departments can operate under a unified CAD system and jointly respond to incidents. CAD Enterprise is flexible in its design, enabling seamless integration with new and emerging technologies to maximize the long-term viability of the system while creating data entry shortcuts that streamline the process and increase efficiency for police dispatchers.

CentralSquare Mobile Enterprise shares information seamlessly between responders, dispatchers and supervisors. The solution places responders proactively where they’re needed, using mobile mapping and intelligent routing to speed up navigation. The Field Ops smartphone public safety app untethered responders from their vehicles, enabling them to see critical incident details and communicate with dispatchers while in the field.

With both solutions, departments maintain the ability to satisfy many key technological requirements, including reliability and the ability to support multi-agency, multi-jurisdiction incidents.

Features and Benefits

After the successful implementation of CAD Enterprise, the benefits the City of Dallas experienced include:

• GIS and automatic vehicle location (AVL) integration into the CAD system, allowing the system to recommend the closest available unit for each call to improve response times
• Automated inter-departmental incident sharing between Police and Fire Rescue for immediate and automatic notification of incidents
• Fire Rescue hazardous address locations and Police tactical information/locations are shared with each other to improve personnel and public safety
• Improved ability to share data with other regional jurisdictions
• First responders empowered with an in-vehicle solution, smartphone public safety app and soon, wearables to provide instant access to critical background, incident and mapping information

CentralSquare’s CAD Enterprise and Mobile Enterprise are reliable and effective solutions that help enhance the City of Dallas’ mission-critical business practices.

Want to know more about how CentralSquare can help your organization? Schedule a demo today.