Santa Monica’s Office of Emergency Management presented the final joint dispatch efficiency study to the audit subcommittee, focusing on data improvements made possible by a new computer-aided dispatch system and the recent hire of a CAD administrator.

The presenter, identified in the transcript by first name later in the meeting as Lindy, said the city changed its CAD system to VersaTerm and has been building reports and hiring a CAD administrator to provide greater visibility into dispatch performance. "CAD is the brain of public safety data," Lindy said. The presentation described SpiderTech text confirmations that notify non-emergency callers about call status; since October, staff reported more than 23,000 text messages sent to reporting parties with roughly an 11% survey response rate.

Lindy contrasted those survey perceptions with state call-answer data: "over 96% of all 911 calls are answered within 10 seconds," and about 95% of non‑emergency calls are answered within 15 seconds, metrics the presenter said surpass state benchmarks. At the same time, Lindy acknowledged gaps in other measures, particularly "call pending time" (the delay between when a call is placed and when a dispatcher picks it up) and longer elapsed times for lower-priority calls.

The presentation broke out call-volume and response-time detail by priority: priority 1 calls (examples given such as shots fired) averaged 2 minutes 33 seconds from call receipt to officer dispatch, priority 2 averaged 11 minutes 37 seconds, and lower priorities could see much longer intervals. Lindy said priority 2 calls are a current focus for improvement and that some long outliers reflect escalation of incidents (for example, a nonemergency that becomes a fight) or high concurrent workload.

Staff and committee members discussed staffing and cross-training. Lindy said nearly all dispatchers are trained for police call taking and about 75% are trained for fire call taking; the center has hired seven staff members over the last 2.5 years and remains about two positions short of the recommended staffing level. Lindy credited the council and budget for enabling the hire of a CAD administrator and outlined plans for dashboards that will help watch commanders and supervisors identify calls that have exceeded target times and provide quality-control feedback to officers and dispatchers.

The subcommittee received the report on the consent calendar. No formal policy change was adopted at the meeting; staff indicated next steps include building dashboards, documenting broadcast timestamps for pending calls, and further analysis before taking on centralized dispatch services for neighboring jurisdictions.