The City of Mustang will be providing an "Employee Spotlight" each month so that citizens can learn more about the public servants that contribute to our City running smoothly. The Employee Spotlight will feature answers to a series of questions about the selected employee, the department and position they serve in, and unique likes and interests of the employee.
The January 2024 Employee Spotlight is Lt. Dylan Wilson, Support Services Division Supervisor, Mustang Police Department
How long have you worked for the City of Mustang? 2024 will make my 13th year with the Mustang Police Department. The number 13 is supposed to be lucky, right?
Where were you born? I was born in Amarillo, Texas, after which I followed my father, who was in the Air Force, to California and eventually Oklahoma;
How long have you lived in Mustang? I moved to Mustang proper in the summer of 1998 just before the start of middle school. I graduated from Mustang High School in 2003, left for college, and my first law enforcement jobs before returning in 2011. Fun fact: I took three application attempts before the Police Department hired me. There were many more candidates back then, but the third time was the charm, or maybe I was just the third-best pick.
Are you married? If so for how long? Children? My wife Megumi and I have been together for over eight years. Meg and I met through a pen pal service where we chatted about cats, and to no surprise, we have no children but three felines ranging in age from 1 to 10 years. A relatively low number, considering we used to volunteer and foster with the Mustang Animal Shelter. Officially, though, we started with one extraordinary cat, Hollywood. He was the shelter mascot for a long time, and when his health began to decline, we officially became parents and never returned him after a stint in the animal hospital. We lived in an apartment that did not allow pets then, so we followed the proper protocol and had him “trained” and certified as an emotional therapy animal. He moved into the home we built in city limits just over a couple of years ago, but he passed away not long after due to an abrupt illness. So, in his honor, we keep a home that is still a welcome refuge whenever the next four-legged needs a place to stay cozy. We built an all-season outdoor “catio” connected to our house, which is bigger than what was our entire apartment living space.
What do you enjoy the most about working for the City of Mustang? I love working close to home and having a house inside Mustang city limits. If you know the difference in services outside and inside the city, it is a way better piece of mind to know who you can call for help, emergency or not, and rest assured that the best people around are working hard and are very talented at what they do. Residing in town allows me to stop by the house for lunch or be ready to respond more quickly to calls for help after hours. The short commute also allows me much more time to wind down at home and have less stress, as my current role often means after-hours phone calls. Knowing the city well helped me build a house with an above ground saferoom closet. Having a servant’s heart and believing in service before self comes with potential consequences. I plan ahead as much as possible with experience helping guide me. I learned early during patrol that should the unthinkable happen, putting others first means you might have to pick up your own pieces later. So, I keep my uniforms pressed and organized in the saferoom. Should our house and belongings take flight, at least I can count on being ready for work because no matter what, the job will always be calling.
What project have you been a part of while employed by the City of Mustang that you enjoyed the most?
Without a doubt, and I would be remiss for not saying our Public Safety Technology modernization project started in 2017. I worked with a great group of first responders who uniformly selected a big part of our upgrade, our primary go-to emergency software, Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD). I pre-configured the system and watched it go live in 2018, replacing physical punch cards. Many hours, blood, sweat, and tears went into getting us where we are today. It became such a labor of love that I am probably forever tied to it. On the plus side, we are a fledgling agency with a solution that offers more features than we were ready for. However, from the moment we switched the technology on, we quickly grew and the job required fine-tuning things and enabling advanced features; even more critical with the addition of a new fire station and emergency operations center. There are so many connections and interfaces that eventual you live, sleep, and breath CAD if you want to stay in tip top shape. I am confident that what we have now is prepared for the unthinkable. So, in truth, I cannot say that I enjoyed it (past tense) because it is a forever component of sustainable emergency services, and you must enjoy every day to look at a system, think critically, and envision change. The job of maintaining such a system means balancing the load users have to do their job, while meeting reporting, record keeping, and other responsibilities and requirements, while then also having to react quickly to unplanned events. You must often think ten steps ahead while ensuring not to negatively impact the current environment. At the same time, you need to review and sometimes challenge the status quo; otherwise, you risk falling behind and, in turn, making more work for yourself and others. Sometimes, things have problems, and technology is no different.
Wide-ranging solutions require just as much problem-solving capability, and if it works right, people probably do not know just how much effort goes on behind the scenes by myself and other Support Services staff. And to their credit, the many business partners and individuals who help sustain our mission. From this ongoing project, I have met many great people from coast to coast and internationally. The reward for me is having had the opportunity to learn and then teach in various states from my experience. I have a lot of pride in knowing that a little of me exists in countless other public safety organizations, so somewhere, I have made a difference outside the rectangle city I call home. I am blessed to work with fantastic people in the public and private sectors. Who would have thought that the Mustang Police Department would contribute to the broadening capabilities of Artificial Intelligence in computing? I feel honored to work for an organization that allows me to connect with others and accomplish goals I never imagined, even just a year ago. I love to see things we do put us on the map for the right reasons. Perhaps I am selfish for thinking my small role is often unsung or thankless. Still, each day, I sleep a bit easier because I know I did my job right, following my high standard of detail, a pride in personal ethics, and the intent of leaving this department someday, having left it better than the way I found it. That is the real trophy I would take away from my career with the City of Mustang when I embark on any next adventure in life.
Favorite Food? I have Crohn’s disease, so food and I have a love-hate relationship. However, I have comfort drinks. I start my day nowadays with a frozen drink from OnCue, which usually gets my shift moving on the right foot. Even in the wintertime, I’ll get a frozen drink. My wife says I have “neko jita,” which is Japanese for cat tongue (imagine that!). As such, I do not have the desire/ability to consume hot drinks. Therefore, summertime in Mustang is my favorite season with snowcones from Cotton Eyed Joe’s.
Favorite Recording Artist? I do not have any particular music favorites. Now that I have a small office (that was once a hallway), I keep commercial-free minimalist instrumental and jazz lounge music playing in the background. That way, when I get busy with something, it keeps me on a steady pace without overt distraction. When I have personal time at home, I am a complete cinephile. I have a ton of recommendations based on whatever genre you might be interested in. I enjoy finding new, older, obscure, and often foreign films new to me.
Do you have a secret skill or talent? I am a fourth-year Ph.D. student at Oklahoma State University’s College of Engineering, Architecture, and Technology, focused on Fire and Emergency Management Administration. My best talent might be having too many things to do with insufficient time. I am halfway through my program, assembling research proposals and lining out a future dissertation. All of which will conclude after my last written and oral exams. Unsurprisingly, my area of study focuses on first responder technology and psychological factors, stressors, and decisions in dispatch, which precipitate actions taken on scene. In other words, I want to understand situational outcomes that result from emergency communications practices, procedures, and technology. I would like my most significant takeaway from this endeavor to aid future scholarly discourse intended to improve public safety operations, both in communication centers and the field, across this city, state, and nation. While fairly technical and admittedly geeky, this past year, I completed a course in agent-based simulation and computer modelization. My final project was very left-field, and I created a program to predict pocket gopher migration. I used a lot of scientific literature reviews to build logic and behavior. I confirmed movement and tunnel structure by catching live gophers from our yard and monitoring their activity over time. As a consequence, I cannot drive by a gopher hole now without thinking about the time I spent making something so strangely satisfying to watch and how much it shaped my understanding of the natural world taking place underground. From a student perspective, I gracefully accepted an “A” grade and look forward to my next pet project!
You are known as the technology genius within the Police Department. What got you interested in technology? I had a few good teachers growing up. My middle school science teacher had projects all week except for Friday, which was reserved for an entire class period of the latest World’s Wildest Police Chases program. As a kid, television, movies, and video games played a role in shaping my thinking. Before and during college, I had the opportunity to design video games with friends. At some point, my interest in making video games shifted from designing conventional creations to simply pushing things to a breaking point and seeing what happens then. That is what I think has helped my success with our current CAD system because I know where the edges are and how to fail so I can pull in the reigns and ensure things run at the peak of optimization. We maintain two environments for CAD: production servers with redundant backup hardware and a training server that allows me to test and break things. Once I know what does not work, I document and archive working processes and transfer approved assets to production. When I teach at our CAD annual user conference, I think this is what gets the most attention. Like anyone, I do not like hearing the word “no” and try not to make that part of my vocabulary unless I have no other choice. I can learn from other users, regardless of their role or technological skills. You must keep in mind that most users do not want to know the ins and outs. They just want the system to work. I am ashamed that sometimes my desk is a mess of sticky notes, but each represents new ideas or adjustments, either my thoughts or suggestions from others. Until I uncheck it from my workstation, it stays there, prioritized, waiting for me to gain more time to make the magic happen.
Pictured beginning on the right is Lt. Wilson with his wife Megumi and recently adopted senior cat Cupcake, followed on the bottom left by a summer group photo with Information Technology Director Jerry Hedrick, Lt. Wilson, and members of the Getec computer hardware crew - Joseph Helou, Den Wei, and David Hess. and a photo on the top left taken in the spring of 2023 at the CAD Conference with Bruce Baartman (the that gave the City of Mustang our first demo of Zuercher in 2017 before it became Central Square).