Walton County Sheriff's Office -- Communications

Communications is a critical part of the response system. The Dispatcher is is truly the lifeline between the citizens and patrons of Walton County and the Sheriff's Office.

Communications operates twenty four (24) hours a day and seven (7) days a week. It is comprised of specially trained communications operators who answer several hundred thousand emergency and non-emergency telephone calls and almost a million radio transmissions each year. The Communications Division of the Walton County Sheriff's Office, consists of two (2) integral functions: telephone communications and radio communications. Through telephone communications, the Sheriff's Office reduces crime through rapid and accurate communication with citizens of Walton County. Through radio communications, deputies and dispatchers stay connected when they are acting upon a call for help or reporting of a crime from a citizen.

To better serve and meet the needs of the citizens of Walton County, the Sheriff's Office has two (2) Communications Centers. One is located in DeFuniak Springs and the other is located in Santa Rosa Beach. We currently have twenty two (22) Communications Officers/Dispatchers who work ten (10) hours a day, four (4) days a week. A dispatcher is a person that must know how to multitask and whose duties are very demanding. They are responsible for answering emergency and non-emergency phone calls from citizens, utilizing the National Crime Information Center and Florida Crime Information Center software connections to track stolen property, research any warrants or criminal record history information nationwide, locate missing persons data, probe the Florida Department of Motor Vehicles and Highway Safety and every other state's databases for information regarding driver licenses and vehicle registration, all the while ensuring that they continue to simultaneously dispatch service calls to the correct zone deputies.

This can be very overwhelming considering that there are over one hundred forty (140) deputies and this has to also be done for the Criminial and Narcotics Investigatiors as well.

We have seven (7) non-emergency landlines and two (2) 9-1-1 landlines that ring directly into each Communication Center. A major tool that has assisted us dramatically is the implementation of the Computer Aided Dispatch system, also known as C.A.D. This top-of-the-line system is used for entering all incident information regarding calls for service, tracking which deputies are responding to the calls, and maintaining other critical information. The C.A.D. also gives us the ability to wirelessly transmit call data to each deputy's mobile computer terminal in their car so that the radio is left open for more important radio traffic. Currently we use state-of-the-art Motorola communications equipment for all radio transmissions. In the event of disaster situations such as hurricanes or tornadoes that causes us to lose power and we no longer have the ability to use primary radios, our backup system is immediately activated, the Florida Interoperability Network. With this system, we have instant communications capability with any agency within the State of Florida.

During the year of 2006 alone, the two Communications Centers combined dispatched a total of 71,725 calls for service in which a deputy was required to respond to an incident or event. This does not include the non-emergency calls for information that did not require a response by a deputy.