Columbus EMS Coordinators on PD TGs

[Colin9690]

Recently I've been hearing the CFD EMS coordinators actively using the CPD Patrol talkgroups. It seems they are now directly using the PD talkgroups to coordinate staging and response to police incidents. Also, I haven't heard a peep out of 8 F-P for a long time. This new plan is a good idea, before when they used F-P it would take forever to get the word from PD whether a response was needed or not whereas now, they can just communicate directly with the police.

 

[wa8pyr]

Recently I've been hearing the CFD EMS coordinators actively using the CPD Patrol talkgroups. It seems they are now directly using the PD talkgroups to coordinate staging and response to police incidents. Also, I haven't heard a peep out of 8 F-P for a long time. This new plan is a good idea, before when they used F-P it would take forever to get the word from PD whether a response was needed or not whereas now, they can just communicate directly with the police.

Actually not a good idea; it's a failure of interoperability due to the unwillingness of CPD to leave their home talkgroups, both in the field and at the dispatcher level. By using POL-FIRE (aka 8 P-F), dispatchers from both departments have access and coordination can be done where everyone can hear it, and channel changing is minimized. They might as well get rid of POL-FIRE for all the good it does.

Now the coordinators have to go from 10 FIRE to 8 P-F to the police talkgroup and back to 8 P-F and maybe back to 10 FIRE if everyone hasn't changed channels, and no one else from CFD (dispatchers, firefighters, etc) has access.

The most effective interoperability is done on common channels where the majority of users (preferably all) have access. By forcing a group of users to have to change from channel to channel to coordinate an incident, you have caused potential delays in coordination since the few with access must now change channels to relay instructions, with the associated risk of "lost in translation."

 

[Colin9690]

Good point..well they might as well get rid of 8 F-P because I never hear it being used anymore.

 

[FireHousesOfOhio]

There actually is quite a bit of traffic running on 8 F&P still .

You can hear medics waiting in staging for very long periods of time who are sounding
just a little irritated about lack of communication & cooperation coming from the PD side.

Unfortunately none of this will change till some poor soul passes on.

 

[ajpritch]

Tom hit it right on. While the Fire and EMS agencies in Franklin county have interoperability by being able to go to each other's talkgroups the Police refuse to change talkgroups to another departments. Making medics sit and wait till somewhere remembers to tell them the scene is secure. Its not just an issue with Police and Fire but with Police to other Police departments. They insist on still using LEERN to talk to each other even though there are common Police channels and they should give each other their talkgroups. They think they are secure when we all know that a cheap scanner will pick them up in the clear

 

[16b]

...and yet again we have a demonstration of the fact that interoperability is not the same thing as intertalkability. Dropping a cool million or ten on the latest shiny toys from Motorola and loading 'em up with 500 "interoperability" channels and calling it good doesn't work. Like FireHousesOfOhio said, this will probably have to be learned the hard way--if at all.

 

[ajpritch]

You mean we don't need 500 "interoperability" channels if we have the normal ones? Really who would have thought of that. Or that just because a radio will do 800+ channels doesn't mean we need to fill them all

 

[FireHousesOfOhio]

About 5 years ago a special duty CPD officer who was killed during a bank robbery. Naturally Mayor Gladhand made his presence known and all of a sudden radios for special duty officers became a priority. Fast forward 2 years past that when we attended the 4th of July firework display in the Park of Roses and the special duty officers there provided their own FRS radios. Any incidents that occurred on the property that night required a relay of communications to an individual with a cell phone to report any kind of a situation.

I seem to remember there was a WMD drill that took place in Indiana involving the US Army & other federal agencies; I do believe the dispatching for the drill originated from Columbus. This all goes back to lessons learned when I was in the Navy; your government can't take care of you or anyone else other than a few scant individuals of alleged importance.

For those of us who've witnessed the agency turf wars cooperation is the least of the #1 priority, it will take the passing of an innocent taxpayer before this all is resolved.