The Communications Unit operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and 365 days a year. Six California Peace Officer Standards & Training (POST) certified public safety/police dispatchers operate the university’s two public safety answering points, handling an average of 19,000 calls per year.
Call types range from general questions about the university and its services, requests to unlock vehicles, to reporting crime and medical/critical incident emergencies. The dispatcher’s primary responsibility however, is to ensure the swift and professional response of public safety and campus resources to calls for service. This includes routing and assigning calls to police, fire, residential life security and community service assistants, in addition to coordinating after-hour calls for emergency facility repairs to PPM (Physical Plant Management).
Continuous improvement in technology and refresher training is a must in today’s public safety dispatching field. CSUN police dispatchers provide monitoring for three public safety radio frequencies, three 911 trunk lines, seven in-coming business phone lines, a burglar and panic alarm monitoring station, the campus Blue Light emergency phone system, the police station’s integrated security and CCTV system, NOAA weather alert station, CSU system-wide emergency satellite phone system, as well as a variety of computer based systems which include the California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System (CLETS), Justice Data Interface Controller (JDIC), National Crime Information Center (NCIC), Parking Management System (T2 FLEX), and Records & Information Management System (RIMS).
Operating as a 911 Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP), members of the Communications Unit meet and often exceed the minimum training standards for public safety/police dispatchers as established by POST. In maintaining the highest level of experience and training, department PSAP dispatchers completed a total of 112 POST certified training hours and 1,105 hours of in-service training in 2012.
