Department of Public Safety Communications

Published 24th July 2015, 4:55pm

Grand Cayman:  July 24, 2015 - The Department of Public Safety Communications released its annual report for the period from July 2014 through June 2015.   The document can be accessed on the department's website at www.911.gov.ky.

The report says that the number of 9-1-1 telephone calls showed a dramatic increase of 20.5% over the prior year. According to the department, the increase can be blamed on abandoned or hang-up calls caused by persons sitting on their phone or letting it bang around in their purse, inadvertently calling 9-1-1.

Overall workload increased by about 6% as evidenced by the number of Calls For Service in which an RCIPS officer, ambulance or fire truck was dispatched or a police report generated.

Even though the number of 9-1-1 calls went up, the time it takes to answer and process those calls went down. Over 97% were answered within 10 seconds and the average time it took to dispatch an emergency call was about a minute and a half. Both the 9-1-1 answering time and dispatch time were well within the international standards that are established for emergency communications centres.

In the last year, the department’s Electronic Monitoring Centre monitored 94 clients who had been tagged with a GPS tracking device, per the instructions of the courts or police.

There were 370 requests from police for copies of video images from the National CCTV Programme. Assistant Director Julian Lewis said that police will search CCTV video after a crime occurs and if they find something significant for evidentiary or investigative purposes, then they request a copy of the video from the department. After 60 days, the video is automatically purged from the National CCTV Programme servers.

Assistant Director Leslie "Lennox" Vernon said that quality assurance reviews were initiated last year. There were 164 call reviews completed which measured the performance of staff members in processing Calls For Service in the Communications Centre. The average score was 88.9%.

The Electronic Monitoring Centre also conducted 120 case reviews with the goal of determining how well the EMC staff processed offender violation alerts. The average score reported was 92.2% according to the report.

During the period of FY14/15 (June 2014 to June 2015), the Department of Public Safety Communications provided mission critical services to its Internal Customers (primarily RCIPS and Emergency Medical Services and secondarily, the Fire Service) and its External Customers (the residents and visitors of all three Cayman Islands).

The Department has two key sections: the 9-1-1 Public Safety Communications Centre and the Electronic Monitoring Centre. The EMC is further broken down into two distinct programmes: Electronic Monitoring of Offenders and the National CCTV Programme.

The annual report can be found on the department’s website at www.911.gov.ky.