IfG.CC -
Institute for eGovernment

Next-gen 911 would allow people to submit voice, text, data, photos and video over an IP-based network to public safety answering points, the communications centers that dispatch emergency calls.

'When I got everything caught up and taken care of, it's like, whew!'

As they so often do, 911 calls came fast and furious on a recent weekday afternoon. A residential burglary. A business burglary. A person with a gun. They all happened at once, in different Evansville neighborhoods.

Amy Worthington was on top of it. Seated in the City-County Dispatch Center, with four computer screens in front of her and her headset in place, Worthington navigated Evansville Police Department officers to each event.

Question: What is full next-generation 911?

Answer: Having a robust GIS solution so that you can graphically control your boundaries and the different things you need to control for 911 call routing. It’s having calls delivered in via Internet Protocol (IP); it’s having that IP network delivering those calls get as close as it can to what the vision of i3 [a technical standards document crafted by the National Emergency Number Association (NENA)] is through NENA.

The new system has transformed and vastly improved customer service in the city.

Grand Rapids, Mich., announced it officially completed phase two of full implementation of the city’s 311 customer service system, Grand Rapids 311 (GR311). The project is now being used to assist customers with nearly all city services, including setting up new refuse and recycling services, water/sewer services, voter registration, property tax information, and city electrical permit and inspection updates.

In a statement on his blog, Emanuel touted the advantages of an interactive 311 system, stating that making data available in real time would help engage the public and in turn, improve transparency in the city.

311 systems have revolutionized the way cities gather information, allowing them to tackle small problems before they get too big. But running them can be extremely costly.

Emergency dispatch centers can respond to 911 texts in Cass, Clay, Jackson, Platte and Ray counties in Missouri, and Johnson, Leavenworth, Miami and Wyandotte counties in Kansas.

When people in the Kansas City area need emergency help, they can now send a text message to 911.

Text-to-911 service has been growing more common among cities across the country in recent years and is now fully operational at all emergency dispatch centers in the Kansas City metro area, the Mid-America Regional Council announced last week.

The next-generation emergency communications system will be built in four phases over the next five years, and is expected to boost speed, security and reliability between PSAP operators, dispatchers and first responders.

Kansas has joined a handful of other states, including Connecticut, Massachusetts and Maine, in implementing next-generation 911 (NG911) systems designed to deliver faster, more reliable communications for emergency workers. The Kansas 911 Coordinating Council expects the NG911 system to boost the speed, security and reliability of communications between operators, dispatchers and first responders.

The Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) ordinarily provides information related to 911 calls to the public and the media, and even provides a Twitter feed. But that changed last Thursday.

According to media reports, a notice posted on LAFD social media sites said that a new interpretation of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) forbids public access to medical information, including response times to emergencies by fire personnel. But LA Mayor Eric Garcetti disagreed and the policy was quickly reversed, with Twitter and 911 call records again available to the public.

By embracing a digital low-code application development platform, the city has been able to combine 911 and 311 in a way that offers public servants more efficiency and citizens more functionality.

New Orleans and the Orleans Parish Communication District have recently consolidated their 911 and 311 systems, leading to major increases in both efficiency and functionality, officials said.

Our phones are getting even smarter and we are becoming increasingly dependent on them, their apps and the wide range of functions they provide.

New tools even government recognizes can help solve old problems.

"We are looking at how we can move very aggressively toward more e-government services for the citizen both on the web as well as on the mobility platform," said Baltimore Chief Information Officer Rico Singleton.

Every service request — by phone, mobile app or Boston’s Web portal — becomes a piece of data that can be used to track the city’s performance.

If traditional, hotline 311 calls and fully staffed call centers are financially unsustainable, then the future of customer service and CRM might be found in the city where the first mobile app was launched. Since that eventful moment, Boston has seen its digital channels grow significantly, expanding 10 percent per year for the past three years, according to CIO Jascha Franklin-Hodge. “Today, we are averaging 59 percent of our service requests through digital channels,” he said. “There’s been a dramatic move by our customers from phone to digital.”

While not everyone is fully convinced of the benefits, most officials believe the concept is at least worth investigating.

Whitman, East Bridgewater, and Bridgewater, for example, plan to apply for state grants from the state Executive Office of Public Safety and Security’s 911 Department in May to cover a feasibility study, the first step in establishing a regional system for police, fire, and medical emergency calls.

A new system would replace equipment on local radio towers, in the dispatch offices and on the officers and emergency personnel all throughout the county.

Allegan County Central Dispatch looks to spend as much as $10 million on a new radio system over the next year.

The local 911 network fielded just shy of 53,000 phone calls last year split between law enforcement, fire services and emergency medical services. The current system was installed in 2001 and is due for a replacement, according to county officials.

In Detroit, the answer, for now, is no.

Motor City jumps on a wave of 311 apps to curb blight by connecting citizens with service departments.

In the wake of the Detroit bankruptcy, blight sieged parts of the city as its populous exited. The fallouts were typical. There was a run of vandalism, thefts, arson and graffiti. Hard times pushed throngs of looters into scores of homes to scavenge for anything that wasn’t bolted down — and often, even for the things that were.

Jeff Mooney recalls the latter.

“There have been many times when people have asked me when the city would have an app to report a pothole. Today is that day,” Mayor R.T. Rybak said in a press release. “But beyond letting us know about potholes and broken street lights, this new app will help make city staff more efficient, save the city money, and will also get more people involved in building a better and safer Minneapolis.”

Managing a local crisis should be a bit more efficient for officials and responders in Neshoba County, Miss., once a new $1.6 million emergency operations center (EOC) opens its doors this spring.

The Public Service Commission and its contractor are working to gather experts to address key obstacles to the rollout of statewide next-generation 911.

In 2017, the Nebraska Public Service Commission embarked on a quest to convince lawmakers to update the state’s 911 system from one reliant on phone calls to an adaptable, modern service that could respond to, for example, a text message in emergencies.

409 people who called 911 within an hour got a busy signal.

Over the course of an hour on the evening of Sunday, June 28, 409 people called 911 to report an emergency to Las Vegas Metro Police. When they did, each of the callers encountered a troubling obstacle — a busy signal.

The Clark County Commission is expected to look into the outage — and how to prevent a future recurrence.