What goes around... comes back?
Consolidated public safety answering point and dispatching is the future.
Ah yes, just as it was (supposed to be) 48 years ago in that part of the county. In 1968 the 10-city "South Bay-Centinela Valley Chiefs of Police Association" began planning a consolidated communications center, records management system and even a regional crime lab. (I'm just focusing on the Police side here; Fire ran kind of parallel, but overall smoother in many respects)
Big dreams often have a habit of falling down in mid-flight, and such was pretty much the case with South Bay.
Redondo Beach PD was the prime mover at first, but for some reason I don't remember they turned it over to Torrance by 1973. They - now watch this - got
Culver City and Inglewood PDs to join in the grant-writing and other organizational chores. Unfortunately a tiff developed between Inglewood and Torrance about which of the two cities would host the dispatch center, and for that among other reasons Torrance dropped out entirely in mid-1974. El Segundo Chief Jim Johnson, a really dedicated guy who'd been interested in the whole idea took over. His first big headaches were decisions by
Culver City and Inglewood to drop out in the Spring and Summer of 1975, leaving 7 cities to carry the built-in financial load that was to have been shared by 10.
After we went "live" in July and August of 1977, four of the remaining PDs fell away - PV Estates, Redondo, Hermosa and El Segundo - but the latter two departments eventually came back. And now Culver City. Hopefully things will run more smoothly this time, politically, operationally, and technically. Fortunately SBRPCA and all the departments have almost a half century of increasing working together, with routine stuff and emergency/disaster interoperability.
If my HTML work works, here's a couple of those early headlines:
If the image doesn't show, try this:
http://users.snowcrest.net/marnells/South_Bay_Blues_1968-75.jpg