South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Police issue pagers to fix Parkland radio problems
After police struggled to communicate during the Parkland school shooting, they came up with a solution: pagers.
The Coral Springs Police Department now issues old-fashioned pagers to counterparts at the Broward Sheriff’s Office so the two agencies can be alerted during a catastrophe.
Coral Springs Police Chief Clyde Parry, in a presentation Friday to the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Commission, said his dispatchers, fire personnel and sheriff’s deputies assigned to Parkland have pagers that sound off simultaneously.
The Sheriff’s Office handles law enforcement in Parkland, while Coral Springs has its own department. Coral Springs
was the lead police agency for more than a half hour after the Stoneman Douglas massacre in February as both agencies scrambled for information.
Officers had trouble communicating because the Broward County radio system buckled under the crush of police officers connecting to its channels.
Parry took over the agency in March, replacing Chief Tony Pustizzi, who retired.
Other changes he announced:
■ His agency has “reprogrammed radios for Parkland’s channel. Should something occur, [we] can dial up … and speak to them.” Coral Springs can now make radio announcements on the channel.
■ Coral Springs now has access to the Parkland district’s computers so “we can see the calls they are responding to.”
■ Radios have been improved so the Sheriff ’s Office now can speak to Coral Springs. “I was floored when I learned they didn’t have our channel programmed into their
console.”
■ Two police officers are assigned to each high school within Coral Springs’ city limits, instead of one.
Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri, the commission chairman, suggested Coral Springs assign a dispatcher to physically sit with the sheriff ’s dispatchers so the two sides can better communicate. During the tragedy when the county’s radios failed, law enforcement used runners so they could speak with each other.
“I don’t think it is good
for the citizens of the state of Florida to call 911 … and they say, ‘Hold on, I’m going to transfer you and you can tell your story again,’” Gualtieri said.
Parry said that since the tragedy killed 17 people, his agency also purchased more ballistic shields for officers.
He said a request made long ago to the School District for officers to have keys has still gone unheeded.
“The School Board didn’t trust the police officers,” he said. Quick access also would allow police to get to their security cameras quickly.
During the Douglas event, for nearly a halfhour after Nikolas Cruz dropped his rifle and fled the school, police thought they were seeing him live on security cameras, still in the building. They were actually seeing delayed images.
“If we had access to that we could have given real time information,” Parry said. “This event has shaken us to our core.”
Gualtieri said agreed that changes need to be made to allow law enforcement real-time access to cameras. But in this case, while it delayed medical response to the third floor, it wouldn’t have changed the outcome.
The injuries, he said, “were immediately lifeending.”
Still, the agency was praised for its aggressive handling in the aftermath.
Justin Senior, the secretary for Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration and a commission member, said had the tragedy occurred at a school within Coral Springs’ city limits, the response would have been more effective.