Geary leadership recently grew concerned over the use of dispatching services in Weatherford. The change was made some months ago when the Geary Police Department could no longer do its own dispatch because of the cost and difficulty in maintaining a full staff of dispatchers. Since Blaine County Sheriff’s Office no longer dispatched, either, Geary, like the rest of the county, turned to Weatherford.
During a city council meeting, Geary Police Chief JJ Stitt suggested some of the confusion during an incident at the high school was because the dispatchers aren’t local and don’t have ties to the community.
Weatherford Police Chief Angelo Orefice was outraged at the idea.
“We want the citizens of Geary to know they are as important to us as anyone,” he said. “We have professional dispatchers, a structured response. They are well trained and well paid and are second to none.”
Dispatch supervisor Jennifer Winegard also stood up for her dispatchers.
“In an event of a violent nature, we are going to send the closest people,” she said. In the case of the fight at Geary High School, the Blaine County Sheriff’s Office, emergency medical personnel and the Geary Police Department were all radioed within 12 seconds. They were unable to contact the police department for nine minutes.
Weatherford dispatch never issued a ‘disregard’ message or a 10-22 call, although Stitt believes he was disregarded. He could not pinpoint who had issued the message.
There is no way of knowing why the messages from dispatch never reached the police department. The radios and the transmission unit in the PD have been checked, Stitt said, by Blaine County Emergency Management, who found no malfunction.
Meanwhile, Blaine County is changing its radios, even though the transmissions on that day were loud and clear in Watonga and elsewhere in the county.
Ideally, Sheriff Travis Daugherty would like to install a computer assisted dispatch, which has pinpoint accuracy on calls. Then Blaine County could be dispatched from Watonga. However, that would cost several hundred thousand dollars between installation, programming and updates, money the SO doesn’t have at the ready.
The county deputies already assist with overnight coverage in Geary. Stitt gives the office kudos for that work. “Blaine County is doing an excellent job. They do a lot for us,” he said.
But if Geary can’t or doesn’t want to continue to keep its own police department, the county is an option.
“I believe we could do it (cover the town) for less than a chief and four to five officers,” Daugherty said.
“We are obligated to cover the town because it’s in the county but if the citizens are paying for a police service they deserve a police service, not a deputy that’s 20 miles away,” he added.
Acting Mayor Rocky Coleman has said in the last year the town of Geary dispatched its own officers, the cost was more than $200,000, in large part because there were only a few dispatchers and in order to have someone on the radio around the clock, the overtime pay was enormous.
As to the dispatchers in Weatherford not having ties to this community, Winegard said that isn’t true, either. They have friends and family members who live in the towns they dispatch to, including those in Blaine County. Some dispatchers live outside Weatherford and commute, a trip made possible by the well-paying jobs they occupy.
While calls come in on dedicated computer screens, dispatchers sitting at quiet screens often back up the person on the line with the caller, getting help started toward trouble before the call is completed.
And they remain connected to the officers on the radio. There is a tone sounded every two minutes or less, reminding the dispatcher to make radio contact with the officer and ascertain he or she is ok until the event is completed.
Even after the fact, dispatchers have been known to call an officer or department to find out how everything turned out or go to a department to meet the officers they dispatch and put a name with a voice on the radio.
That doesn’t end at a city limit sign or at a county border.
“They all get the same attention as any of the citizens of Weatherford,” Orefice said.