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Started this afternoon on SPD South,went to SPD West,then state patrol.lasted almost an hour!Link to story.

http://www.kirotv.com/news/13671584/detail.html

This pursuit, along with the boat fire on Clyde Hill the other day, are further proof that you can build great interoperability into a radio system, but if you don't train people on how to use it, it's worthless.

True that. It's a common problem in King County. *Some* administrators insist on only allowing certain talkgroups in the radios, and argue that "if you need to talk to someone else, we'll just patch you"......

Well, it doesn't work that well. I can count the ways:

-Herzog Shooting, Newcastle
-Wild Bellevue Pursuit that went into Kirkland and Bothell, covered by a news helicopter live (many problems with that one)
-Redmond pursuit of armed robbery suspect into Bellevue last year
-Renton Pursuit of stolen car into Bellevue
-State Patrol foot chase from 520 onto Bellevue surface streets (more than once)...
-Bellevue Pursuit of armed robber into Arboretum of Seattle
-Bellevue pursuit of armed robber from Crossroads, into Redmond, then into Kirkland (ended up in an officer involved shooting at Bartells).

And, these are the ones I was personally involved with...there are undoubtedly more. Other parts of the county may have the patching thing down better (like Valleycom or KCSO).

Some progress is being made. King County SO is finally allowing outside agencies to access their talkgroups, but agencies have been slow to re-program radios. Having other agencies TG's already in your radio is a far better interoperability resource than patching.

State Patrol insists on maintaining a VHF system. Makes it harder to interop with them, except for MARS or LERN. The hardest part is getting them to switch over (sometimes easier said than done, especially when they may be going real fast up the freeway...). Patching MARS or LERN may or may not work - depends on what dispatcher is working at the time.

The TRIS backbone is a potentially cool way to link stuff up - but, that's assuming that someone is actually in your comm center that knows how to create the links in a timely manner.

Any interoperability system that depends on a dispatcher/dispatch center is prone to a certain degree of failure. Not slamming dispatchers - it's the system they have to work with.

And, most of the field users are *NOT* radio-literate. Can't expect them to be nerds like the rest of us. They just want to "press the button and talk", and don't really understand the extent of communications capability they have available to them - unless they are specifically told to "switch to channel xx".

The old days may have been easier in some ways. 4 channel MICOR's, very little learning curve.....

Brad/N7JGX
Whidbey Island, WA

_________________
Whatever.....

ValleyCom and to a lesser extent KCSO seem to have patching down pat. Whenever there is a major PD call in ValleyCom's area (shooting, stabbing, etc.) that is close to an outside agency's boundary, they automatically patch to a PSOPS talkgroup. When the Renton PD Officer was shot, they instantly patched to PSOPS and half of Seattle was quickly responding and able to talk to them. ValleyCom also will routinely patch fire calls that also have LEOs responding -- i.e. water rescue incidents -- to a PSOPS talkgroup. KCSO seems to do the same when they've got a major incident close to an outside agency's response area -- they patch to PSOPS.

Then there's Bellevue and Seattle. At the boat fire on Clyde Hill the other day, there were boats from three different police agencies on the water side: Seattle, KCSO, and Mercer Island. The dispatcher comes on the fire talkgroup and says, "we don't have the ability to patch you to talk to the marine units." That's simply not true -- Bellevue could patch a fire talkgroup to PSOPS, tell the PD guys to go to that talkgroup, and then the fire IC could talk to the boats. They've done it on drownings before. They patch on fire talkgroups all the time. But unfortunately some dispatchers in Bellevue apparently don't know how to use the system. That's a major comment on the leadership there, or lack thereof.

That chase with the semi that came from Seattle -- same deal. The dispatchers there could've patched to PSOPS so the Eastside people could talk to SPD. But they didn't, probably because they don't train to do it.

It drives me nuts that we spent all of this money on a system that is built really well to be interoperable and people don't know how to use it because the leadership doesn't train and drill it into them. It only takes a couple mouse clicks. There should be protocols for it so it's automatic. Fire on the waterfront? Patch to PSOPS at the time of call. Pursuit? Patch to PSOPS or MARS immediately. Officer involved shooting? Patch to PSOPS or MARS immediately. It seems so simple. I can't figure out why certain dispatch centers won't do it.

The humans are ruining the technology.