Three questions with a (former) telecommunicator: Robert Parnell 

Law enforcement was not his original career plan, but 17 years later he’s a retired telecommunicator who’s now helping other telecommunicators serve their communities. Meet Robert Parnell, a former telecommunicator now working at Mark43.

One in ten Mark43 employees are former law enforcement or public safety professionals. Collectively, they bring more than 400 years of specialized experience to the company, and we put that experience to work every day for our customers. In this series you’ll meet some of these exceptional Mark43 employees.

Starting out as a dispatcher at the Baylor University Department of Public Safety in 2004, Robert Parnell continued his service at the College Station Police Department where he worked as a dispatcher for another 15 years before leaving to join the team at Mark43.

How did you come to work at Mark43?

After 17 years as a dispatcher, I had gotten to the point where I needed a career change. Dispatchers, and law enforcement overall, are often required to work long hours and lots of overtime. The result is that you miss a lot of personal and family events. I did not not want to walk away from all the experience and knowledge that I had acquired over the last 17 years, however, so I looked around at opportunities at law enforcement software companies. Mark43 seemed like the best fit for me – I had a friend who worked there and recommended the company highly –  so I applied and I’ve been here since October of 2021.  

Can you tell us about your role at Mark4?

I am a Software Support Analyst Level II, specializing in anything having to do with Records Management Systems (RMS). We have a Level I team that does all of our support ticket intake, meaning they look over the ticket as it comes in and they help out however they can. Once it gets to a point where it needs to be sent to a specialist or needs to go to engineering, it gets elevated up to me. Most of my day is spent working on those tickets. I spend a lot of time trying to recreate issues that the customer is having so we can determine if it’s a bug or something that is not working right. I act as if I am the user at the agency and I try to recreate  the issues they might be having. 

“The biggest thing that people don’t know about being a dispatcher is that it can be just as stressful as being an officer on the street. In some cases, it may even be more stressful because we can’t physically do anything about the call.  All we can do is take their information – it can be a very helpless feeling at times.”     

How do you see your experience as a dispatcher helping our partners and the public at large?

It gives me a lot more insight into what a telecommunicator does. I can understand a lot more of what the dispatchers are saying. There are a lot of terms that, if you are not in law enforcement, you may not understand their meaning. I’ve got the experience so I can understand those tickets as they come in, and I’ve got enough of a background so that I can say “Maybe we need to take a look at this design or the way that we do this, and maybe we can find a better way to do things.”  

Bonus question: What is something that most people don’t know about being a telecommunicator?  

The biggest thing that people don’t know about being a dispatcher is that it can be just as stressful as being an officer on the street. In some cases, it may even be more stressful because we can’t physically do anything about the call. All we can do is take their information – it can be a very helpless feeling at times. 

Mark43 is the leading cloud-native public safety technology company. Learn more about the Mark43 Public Safety Platform that includes Mark43 Alternate  CAD, a resilient, user-friendly cloud-native platform designed to serve as a backup to the agency’s primary CAD. For more information or to request a demo, visit Mark43.com