The Cleveland (UK) Police Authority has approved a plan to privatize several support services, including finance, human resources, purchasing, information technology and the agency’s communications center, including 999 call handling. The police authority signed a $258 million, 10-year contract with Europe-based IT services company Steria, which the agency says will save nearly $74 million over the life of the contract. Under the contract, Steria will staff and operate the existing comm center, continuing the current training requirements and operating regulations. Current employees will not lose their jobs. The union that represents the 470 affected employees claims that the public wasn’t sufficiently consulted, and is still considering what action to take. The comm center fields about 1,000 telephone calls per day and handles 700 incident daily. Read the Authority’s announcement of the plan here.
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I understand the needs to cut costs, but this does not seem a good idea, but it seems the role of a dispatcher is being underestimated for want of a better word. The dispatcher is the first point of contact between the public and the police, to have the centre staffed by dispatchers who either have no experience with police work, what the police deal with and have no understanding of what police officers and support officers have to deal with on the street, have to deal with, to the staff that are kept on and have to deal with low morale, I think this is going to turn out to be a false economy
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I see part o a headline and little else.
I updated some software, and there are a few display glitches. However, this story is displaying correctly in Safari and Firefox.
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