Are Real-Time Centers Causing a Reshuffling of 911 Dispatcher Duties?

I've written elsewhere that police "real time crime centers" are disrupting 911 centers . When I used the term disruption , some readers thought it to be negative, as opposed to the neutrality I meant. But now, I'm leaning towards it being a positive term. Here's what I'm thinking... In the late 1990s, I was a new cop. It wasn't uncommon for uniformed patrolmen or patrolwomen to cover 911 desks when dispatchers called in sick. We'd be call-takers and dispatcher for fire, police, and medics. It was somewhat overwhelming - with the 911 phones, jail surveillance cameras, alarm boards, radio consoles, TDD systems, dot-matrix printers, monochrome monitors... And the technology stuffed into our dispatcher center seemed to grow every year - GPS systems, city pod cameras, databases, and plenty of other tools that I'd rather not name publicly. And with each new tool or tech, the complaints from dispatchers were as predictable as the sunrise: " We can&