The 911 dispatcher who took the call from the suspected firebomber of the Governor’s Residence within an hour of the attack should have escalated the call, but didn’t, Dauphin County officials admitted.
Chief Clerk Eric Hagarty said the county learned the 911 dispatcher “did not appropriately escalate the call in accordance with County policy,” though county officials declined to provide the policy in question.
LEONARDTOWN, Md. – The St. Mary’s County Department of Emergency Services is celebrating a major milestone in emergency communications, tracing its evolution from a modest two-dispatcher Civil Defense Emergency Control Center in 1954 to a fully modernized 9-1-1 Emergency Communications Center (ECC) in 2025.
HAGERSTOWN – The night of April 19 inundated Washington County’s 911 Emergency Communications Center with a record-breaking 1,518 emergency calls over six hours as a powerful storm swept through the region with scant warning, causing widespread damage and prompting thousands of urgent pleas for help.
Telecommunicators are responsible for quickly assessing calls, coordinating multi-agency responses, and relaying critical information to officers in the field. According to the National Emergency Number Association (NENA), an estimated 240 million 911 calls are made annually in the United States, not including calls to non-emergency numbers and administrative phone lines. According to the same NENA statistics, about 80% of 911 calls come from wireless devices, adding to the complexity of pinpointing caller locations, understanding incident dynamics, and adding the possibility of text and video information for the telecommunicator to sort through.
New Mexico’s highest court on Monday clarified a question posed by a federal court about which law to consider when weighing an emergency dispatcher’s legal immunity from allegations of a mishandled 911 call.
In a unanimous decision published on Monday, the New Mexico Supreme Court found that the Enhanced 911 Act, “has no bearing on the 911 dispatchers’ immunity from liability for the allegedly mishandled 911 emergency medical calls.”
Children of Boone County’s public safety employees will soon have a new space to stay while their parents are in the line of duty.
The Boone County Public Safety Childcare Center will provide affordable, extended child care access to law enforcement and joint communications employees within Boone County government. Construction will begin in the summer of 2025 and is expected to be completed by the fall.
Learn about current efforts to continue to protect the 4.9 GHz Band for public safety as well as recent filings, key decisions impacting these efforts, and how you can support PSSA’s initiative to protect the 4.9 GHz band for public safety.
