Town Plans to Civilianize Dispatchers

The task of dispatching firefighters to incidents has been turned over to non-sworn, “civilian” personnel at thousands of fire departments across the country–but not all. Now Greenwich (Conn.) will make the transition, freeing up eight firefighters so they can move back to firehouses and perform they work they were hired, trained and are paid to do. “It’s very specialized training to handle fire calls, so we would like to get started and work out any bugs in the system we might have,” police Lt. Richard Cochran, who is managing the switch because it includes using the existing police comm center staff. Under the plan, the eight firefighter positions will handled by the current 16 PD dispatchers, supervised by three new positions, hopefully drawn from the ranks of the existing staff. By the way, the police comm center itself civilianized in 2005, but still includes retired police officers.