MCP Insights

The Other Side of Early Adoption in the Public Safety Community

Being an early adopter in the public safety/emergency response community is a wonderful thing. It is exhilarating to be on the leading edge of technology innovation, especially when one is steeped in the belief that such innovation will save many more lives—which happens to be the public safety communications community’s business.

However, as with most things in life, there is a flip side to this coin, which is that it not always easy to be an early adopter. To pull it off one needs not only considerable vision and drive, but also an equal measure of fortitude.

Recently I moderated a panel discussion regarding a pilot project conducted earlier this year that explored how social media data could be leveraged to enhance emergency response. (If you missed this free webinar, it is archived here. I urge you to take the time to view it—a lot of great information was presented on a very interesting project.)

Pilot Project Offers Insight into Using Social Media Data for Emergency Response

In a recent post, MCP Insights chatted with Dr. Andrea Tapia, associate professor of information sciences and technology at Pennsylvania State University (PSU) in State College, about the impact social media is beginning to have on the 911 community. This post explores a pilot project that concluded in August 2018 at the Charleston County (S.C.) Consolidated 911 Center that explored the use of social media data in emergency management and response. MCP, RapidSOS and RapidDeploy also participated in the pilot project.

Collaborators from PSU’s College of Information Sciences’ 3C Informatics: Crisis, Community and Civic Informatics, led by Dr. Tapia—who is working with MCP for the next year as she takes a sabbatical from her duties at Penn State—explored how access to social media data could impact 911 operations, specifically by improving situational awareness during emergencies.

You can hear from all pilot program participants, including the Director of the Charleston County Consolidated 911 Center, during MCP's panel discussion on social media and 911 on Thursday, December 13, 2018 at 12:00 PM ET. Register here.

[Interview] The Impact Social Media is Having on the Public Safety Community

As people change how they communicate, 911 must change too.

Recently MCP Insights chatted with Dr. Andrea Tapia, associate professor of information sciences and technology at Pennsylvania State University in State College, about the impact social media is beginning to have on the 911 community.

Dr. Tapia is working with Mission Critical Partners for the next year, as she takes a sabbatical from her duties at Penn State, to help public safety agencies leverage the opportunities that social media interactions provide to enhance emergency response.

Insights: Why is social media becoming more important to the emergency response community?

Tapia: Society has changed the way it communicates. Most of society is not using the telephone as it has in the past. This isn’t true of only the younger generations—even older people are changing. My 75-year-old father is texting now rather than making phone calls, mostly because his children and grandchildren insist that he do so. The middle and younger generations are changing because they want to, while the older generations are changing because they must. Most of society—even the reluctant—are changing.

Top Takeaways from APCO 2018

Earlier this month, public safety communications professionals descended on Las Vegas for the 2018 APCO International Conference and Expo, the premier event for those in the public safety industry. Over four days, attendees participated in professional development sessions and toured the exhibit hall to talk with vendors and subject-matter experts to gain their insights regarding the future of emergency communications.

While this year’s focus conference focused heavily on cutting-edge issues and technology, there were a few especially hot topics that kept the convention center buzzing.

INTERVIEW: Helping 911 Evolve as Technology Evolves

This blog post is the second in a two-part series with two MCP experts, John Cunnington and Nancy Pollock, who together have more than of 80 years of experience in public safety communications. This blog post is part of our Let's Evolve 911 campaign that commemorates the 50th anniversary of the first 911 call, which took place 50 years ago this year.

In a previous post, Nancy Pollock and John Cunnington shared their perspectives on the evolution of 911 service in the United States over its first half century. In this post, they pick up where they left off, finishing with their insights regarding the sector’s future.

MCP Insights: In the previous post, you spoke of the addressing challenges that existed in the early stages of 911 service. But eventually, ANI/ALI and selective routers became ubiquitous—so the next big step forward was the introduction of CAD.

Nancy: To understand how important the introduction of CAD was, you have to understand how things were done before it arrived. 

John: There was a manually created “run card” for every physical location—on that card was a list of the various emergency services that could be dispatched to that location. These run cards were the precursors of the datasets that are contained in today’s CAD systems. When a call came in, the dispatcher would pull the run card and use it to make the appropriate dispatching decisions. It was important that the run card was put back in its rightful place, so that it would be available for the next incident at that location. Keeping the cards updated was a major effort.

INTERVIEW: In the Early Days, Implementing 911 Was No Easy Task

This blog post is the first in a two-part series with two MCP experts, John Cunnington and Nancy Pollock, who together have more than of 80 years of experience in public safety communications. This blog post is part of our Let's Evolve 911 campaign that commemorates the 50th anniversary of the first 911 call, which took place 50 years ago this year.

A national property insurance firm coined the slogan, “We know a thing or two because we’ve seen a thing or two.” Given the collective experience of MCP’s experts, it is a slogan we too would be justified in using.

In this year when the 50^th anniversary of 911 service in the United States is being celebrated, two of those experts, John Cunnington and Nancy Pollock, shared their memories about the things they’ve seen over their well-established 911 careers, with a focus on the evolution of 911 service to date.

MCP Insights: What was 911 service like when you started your career?

John: I started in the mid-1970s, in a very rural part of central Pennsylvania, and for the first six to eight years we didn’t have routine access to 911 service. With only small towns or cities with 911, depending on the type of emergency, citizens would call 10-digit numbers for each discipline: police, fire, EMS and so on. Consolidated communications centers was our key focus. It was a lot to coordinate, and getting calls to the right place was cumbersome, time-consuming and fraught with error. And even though we could see the benefits of consolidating all calls in a single emergency number and platform, many service chiefs and local elected officials resisted the change, citing local control and knowledge. The key to our early success was having a “champion” in each county for consolidation. In my early experience, I was supported by courageous police chiefs, EMTs and firefighters to keep consolidation in the forefront. They were the early adopters in those years.

Integrating crowd-sourced data into 911 is a great idea

During the Early Adopter Summit—a gathering of 911 industry professionals on the leading edge of disruptive innovation, both technological and operational, convened last November by Christy Williams, 911 director for the North Central Texas Council of Governments (NCTCOG)—Michael Morris, NCTCOG’s director of transportation, told a story about a colleague who recently had encountered a considerable amount of road debris.

The colleague had called 911 to report the debris and learned that this was the only call that had been received about the matter. However, the colleague also was told that Waze, the crowd-sourced mapping and navigation application, indicated that five of its users had reported the debris, with the first instance occurring 38 minutes prior to the colleague calling 911.

Integrate Waze with the 911 system?

Morris then spoke about the possibility of someday integrating applications such as Waze with the 911 system. “I’m not saying that it would be easy to integrate Waze with a 911 system,” he said. “But there are algorithms that can be written so that, maybe once you get the second or third verification … it (becomes) a 911 item. It gets back to the notion of prevention, versus just responding.”

911’s History is Gratifying, but its Future is Thrilling

Considering that our planet is about 4.5 billion years old, a 50-year slice doesn’t seem all that significant—until one considers the amazing progress that can be achieved in such a timeframe. Take aviation for instance. On December 17, 1903, at Kitty Hawk, N.C., Orville and Wilbur Wright made the first flight of a powered aircraft; the voyage lasted 12 seconds and covered 120 feet. By the early 1950s, jets were traversing the Atlantic Ocean on a regular basis, and soon after the first non-stop flight to Australia occurred.

Telecommunicators Deserve the Spotlight All Year Long

Every year in June when I was a kid, my father and I shared the same joke. We did this on Father’s Day. I would say to him, “Must be nice … so, when is Kid’s Day?” And he would reply, “Every day is Kid’s Day.” Behind the humor was truth—he and my mother celebrated me and my brothers, and went above and beyond every day to give us a good start in life.

A tribute to our nation's telecomunicators

What got me thinking about that is National Telecommunicators Week, which is celebrated annually during the second week of April. It could be well argued that the nation’s 9-1-1 call-takers, dispatchers and supervisors—the unsung heroes of emergency response—deserve to be honored every week of the year.

The gravity of the job is tremendous, and so are the stresses. Those who call 9-1-1 are experiencing the worst day of their lives, and for some of them it will be the last day.

Lives are on the line and seconds count

Recently I did a Google search using the phrase, “most disturbing 9-1-1 calls.” The stories are as heartbreaking as they are eye-opening. The emotional toll on the telecommunicators who field such calls is staggering. But they don’t have the luxury of succumbing to those emotions. Remember that when a 9-1-1 call is placed, lives are on the line and seconds count. Ergo, telecommunicators must keep their wits about them at all times, lest they be unable to do what is needed. This involves dispatching the appropriate emergency response, of course, but also keeping the person on the other end of the line calm and, often, providing life-saving instructions to the caller, and vital information to first responders en route to enhance their situational awareness.