Deltek Analyst Kristin Howe reports.
As we spend time this week honoring the nation’s public safety telecommunicators, it is important to review statistics surrounding public safety answering points (PSAPs) and telecommunicators to fully understand how omnipresent they are. While there is no official documentation on how many telecommunicators are employed in the U.S., conservative estimates appearing in Dispatch Magazine On-Line, using data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics in 1999, place the number at nearly 196,000. At that time, there were 5,000 PSAPs in the U.S. Now, there are more 8,000; therefore, it is likely that the number of dispatchers has risen proportionally.
Nationwide, Texas has the most PSAPs, with 663 according to the Federal Communications Commission’s PSAP Registry, which was last updated on March 20, 2012. New Hampshire has the fewest PSAPs (4), followed by the District of Columbia (7). From the 8,329 PSAPs listed in the FCC’s registry, 848 were “orphaned” from the original registry that began in 2003. This means that they are no longer considered primary call-taking answering points, though they may still be operating as secondary answering points.
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