SEATTLE — In Seattle, the city says it receives about 900,000 emergency 911 calls a year. The high call volume combined with a lack of officers right now has the city looking at alternatives.
The city wants to see if community service officers, crisis response experts, and behavioral health providers could be dispatched to certain calls. But exactly which calls and how the process would work are still being figured out.
The internet was out for days, calls were affected, including 911 service.
ST JOHNS, Arizona — The Arizona Corporation Commission is having staff draft a list of steps Frontier Communications will need to take to prevent similar outages to one earlier this month in northeast Arizona.
The Arkansas 911 Board has not received the required plans from any of the state’s counties to consolidate 911 operations to comply with a 2019 law, C.J. Engel, executive director of the Arkansas 911 Board, said in an interview.
Under the Public Safety Act of 2019, counties with more than one Public Safety Answering Point — a central location where all 911 calls are answered — must submit plans by Jan. 1 to merge 911 centers.
As the Durham, North Carolina, Community Safety Department (DCSD) prepares for changes to its computer-aided dispatch (CAD) system, it launched four pilot programs that could change how the city responds to emergency calls involving mental health crises.
The center is designed to help responders and technology designers simulate various scenarios, such as simulations of search and rescue activities or coordinated, complex terrorist attacks.
FirstNet Authority Chief Network and Technology Officer Jeffrey Bratcher says the lab will be the technical headquarters and training lab “for the augmented reality and virtual reality aspects for public safety.”
SANTA FE, N.M. — Bernard “Buster” Brown inherited a severe staffing shortage at the local 911 dispatch center when he stepped into its top job in November.
The New York native, with more than 25 years of experience in emergency dispatch centers, vowed to address the 49 percent vacancy rate and said he hoped to make the Santa Fe Regional Emergency Communications Center a model for the state.
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.
