by AllThingsECC.com | Dec 11, 2019 | Comm Center News
Last year, Dallas’ police and fire departments teamed up with
Parkland Hospital to rethink how they responded to 911 calls involving
mental health crises. They placed a social worker inside the dispatch
center to triage calls and sent out a special team staffed with a mental
health professional whenever possible. They targeted South Central
Dallas, the area with the highest concentration of mental health-related
calls.
The hope was that social workers could handle these cases without relying on the city’s overcrowded emergency rooms and jails.
The results have been promising. In 2019, the volume of psych patients at Parkland’s ER rose 30%. But the trend has largely been reversed in areas covered by the program, which is called RIGHT Care. The number of psych patients arriving from those areas dropped by 20%.
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by AllThingsECC.com | Dec 11, 2019 | Comm Center News
LANCASTER – Fairfield County Sheriff’s
Office radio dispatcher Ted Duffus never knows how a call he handles may
turn out. It could be nothing or it could mean life or death.
“Every phone call’s a new challenge for us,” Duffus said. “There’s nothing, nothing the same. Not from one second to the next.”
It’s no exaggeration to say Duffus routinely deals in life and death situations at work. Years ago he heard a caller commit suicide with a gun while he was on the line with them.
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by AllThingsECC.com | Dec 11, 2019 | Comm Center News
MURRAY, KY — A 911 dispatcher in west Kentucky has been charged with
identity theft and harassing communications after police say she created
a fake social media account pretending to be a Murray woman.
The
dispatcher — 46-year-old Tonya Clevidence of Benton, Kentucky — was
arrested Monday. The Murray Police Department said in a news release
Monday that Clevidence is accused of creating a social media account
using another woman’s identity. The victim told officers someone has
been sending texts and social media messages to others using her name
for about two years.
The release said investigators got a search warrant for the IP address of the computer from which the messages were sent, and connected….
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by AllThingsECC.com | Dec 11, 2019 | Comm Center News
With nearly three-quarters of 9-1-1 calls in B.C. originating from cellphones, E-Comm says knowing your location is now more important than ever. Of the more than 1.13 million 9-1-1 calls the emergency communications centre has received so far in 2019, 74 percent originated from a cellphone-a 10 per cent increase over five years. With more people using mobiles only and social media geotagging and delivery apps that show location in real-time, E-Comm is concerned that there’s a potentially dangerous public misconception that cellphones provide an exact address or location to 9-1-1 call takers…
by AllThingsECC.com | Dec 11, 2019 | Comm Center News
MCALLEN – Medical experts in Hidalgo County are learning some residents are too scared to call for help, according to a new study.
Hidalgo County EMS conducted 600 interviews with individual people for the study.
They found people living in the U.S. illegally are more likely to refrain from calling 9-1-1 in a life or death situation. [VIDEO]…
by AllThingsECC.com | Dec 11, 2019 | Comm Center News
Three weeks after NBC 5 Investigates first exposed a controversial 911 call for help —
in which a man was delayed in having dispatchers send an ambulance for
nearly ten minutes — the City of Chicago now says “more should have
been done,” to help him, and says it’s now making changes in its Office
of Emergency Management and Communications as a direct result of NBC 5’s
investigation.
While an OEMC spokesperson says the office has “reprimanded” two dispatchers and issued some new guidelines, no one from OEMC is willing, yet, to go on camera to answer NBC 5’s most basic question:
Early in the morning of Oct. 2, Raible – of Bangor, Pennsylvania — was on a business trip in Chicago, alone in his room at a Gold Coast hotel, when he ….
