D.C. Develops an Interesting Approach to Triaging Low-Acuity 911 Calls

An epidemic is afflicting the entire United States. It involves low-acuity emergency calls to 911 call centers that are overburdening the emergency medical services (EMS) provided by municipal governments. This burden is even extending to the emergency rooms (ERs) to which these patients are transported. The result is that emergency medical technicians (EMTs) increasingly are suffering from stress and morale issues, ambulances are falling into disrepair, and ERs are struggling to keep up with the demand.

Low-acuity calls are those that do not qualify as Basic Life Support (BLS) or Advanced Life Support (ALS) incidents, such as sprains, the flu, a cut requiring stitches, stomach cramps and the like. The problem is that when someone dials 911, the municipality is obligated to dispatch an ambulance/EMT/paramedic to the incident to assess the patient’s condition and, given some patient bill of rights, transport the patient to an ER. This is required regardless of the severity of the incident, even for low-acuity calls, which require neither a visit from EMTs or transport to an ER.

Five Professional Development 'Must-Dos' for Public Safety Organizations & Pros

Ten years ago this month, the United States Congress recognized April as “National 911 Education Month”, and ever since the 911 community has organized dedicated events throughout their communities to support public education about this vital, life-saving service. This month also is a fitting time to look inward and focus attention on how much emphasis is placed on education within our own organizations, whether it be a 911 center or a company like ours.

At MCP, we view professional development and mentoring as an integral part of our culture. Not only does it help our staff members cultivate their knowledge and remain current on technological and operational developments, it also plays an important role in employee retention. Every year, we invest more than a million dollars in development and training because we recognize that not investing in our staff could negatively impact how we serve our clients.

For our clients, and public safety professionals in general, the same holds true. Invest in yourself and / or your agency and you will reap the rewards.

Professional development and mentoring in emergency communications has never been as important as it is today for two reasons.

Life at MCP: Meet Todd Johnson, P.E.

Our people and culture make Mission Critical Partners (MCP) a great place to work.

Our "Life at MCP" series introduces our team members, the role they play in our organization and their passion for helping the public safety industry thrive.

It's all in the family

Todd Johnson, PE, a senior technology specialist at MCP, is a second-generation mission-critical communications expert. During his childhood, he spent countless hours by his father’s side—a major source of inspiration for him—dabbling with electronics and wiring at his technician’s workbench. For Todd, telecommunications is far more than an occupation, it’s family business.

His father served in the Navy during Vietnam and later played an instrumental role at Motorola in developing new communications platforms. His love for public safety communications and his passion for the mission began in his early years.

“I bring a unique perspective to my projects,” Todd says. “I’ve been fortunate to wear many different hats throughout my career. I’ve worked in the vendor community on large-scale communications networks, I spent time at the city of Houston working as an assistant director implementing the largest urban trunking system, and now, I’m rounding out my experience as a consultant at Mission Critical Partners (MCP).”

Records Are Meant To Be Broken, Right? DDoS Attacks Are a Concern to 911

Computer and cybersecurity nerds across the internet are marveling at last week’s report of a record-breaking distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack aimed at a software development website called GitHub that caused intermittent access outages.

For those unfamiliar with DDoS attacks, they are intended to block public access to an online service by flooding it with junk data or repeated requests from multiple, and often compromising sources, thereby rendering legitimate access impossible. DDoS attacks are increasing in quantity, breadth, and sophistication. Some attacks have gone as far as demanding a ransom to terminate the attack.

Cyber attacks are on the rise, and public safety MUST protect against them

As we talk with our public safety communications clients about implementing a statewide emergency services IP network (ESInet) and / or Next Generation Core Services (NGCS), we cannot stress enough that protecting these Internet Protocol (IP)-based, broadband-enabled networks is paramount. Government DDoS attacks  have already caused many detrimental and unforeseeable effects on emergency response. Recently, the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC) released their 2018 SLTT Government Outlook which, not surprisingly, highlighted its position that the “sophistication of malware, cyber threat actors, and tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) will continue to increase.”

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.”

A Case for 911’s Most Impactful Milestone Thus Far

Anniversaries and milestones go hand in hand. Consider the arc of a typical human life. A person is born. That momentous event is followed by others: the first day of school, graduations, marriage, children, and then grandchildren and, if they’re fortunate, retirement, with a few personal and professional achievements realized along the journey. The longer the life, the more the milestones pile up.

911’s 50th Anniversary Wish List: Advanced Mobile Location

Three weeks ago, my colleague, John Chiaramonte, made an impassioned plea to the four major wireless carriers. He asked them to serve the critical needs of the 911 sector and all those who dial those digits in their time of greatest need by turning on Advanced Mobile Location (AML)—now.  Today, on the 50^th Anniversary of 911, I am delighted to write about an alternate solution to getting life-saving enhanced location technology into the hands of the telecommunicator.

Yesterday afternoon, RapidSOS released the results from its NG911 Clearinghouse Android Emergency Location Services (ELS) Pilot Project held last month in three jurisdictions across the United States: Collier County, Florida, North Central Texas, and Loudon County, Tennessee.  Each represents a variety of topography and population, as well as integration with an assortment of existing public safety answering point (PSAP) software.

Change for 911 is Inevitable, and That's a Good Thing

Change is an interesting concept, a philosophical tug of war if you will. It can be viewed as positive or negative, exciting or demoralizing, vital or unnecessary, and easy or difficult, depending on one’s perspective. The one thing that universally can be said about change is that it is inevitable. As the ancient philosopher Heraclitus once opined, “The only thing that is constant is change.”

Change also is disruptive, which is why many people and organizations try to avoid it. The status quo is comfortable. It is known, and the unknown tends to make people uncomfortable at best, fearful at worst. For many people and organizations, accepting change is akin to declaring defeat, to admitting that the current approach isn’t working.

Profound changes are coming to the public safety sector

Yet, profound changes are coming to the public safety sector, like runaway trains, one after the other. Text-to-911 service is being implemented in many jurisdictions, which will provide equal access to the 911 system to the deaf, deaf-blind, hearing-impaired, and speech-impaired communities, in addition to those who would place themselves in greater danger if they make a 911 voice call, such as during a home invasion or domestic-abuse incident. Text-to-911 is a life-changing development if ever there was one.

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.

Apple Announces a Promising Step Toward Solving 911's Wireless Location Challenges

Sensational headlines criticizing the 911 industry’s inability to accurately and quickly locate emergency callers abound, like this recent one in the Wall Street Journal: “Why Uber Can Find You but 911 Can’t.” This is one of the industry’s most intractable issues—as TV host John Oliver said in 2016, “There doesn’t appear to be a simple, satisfying answer,” to why smartphone apps provide much better location information than that received by 911 centers.

Those within the industry understand the problem: 80 percent or more of all 911 calls are made using a wireless device, and such calls are routed based on Phase I data, which is the location of the cellular tower. More accurate “Phase II” data can become available (usually) in 25-35 seconds of the call being received by the 911 center, but that depends on multiple factors, including signal strength/distortion, geography and topology, especially when calls are made inside structures.

But, smartphones are supposed to be “smart” and the device knows where the caller is physically located, because of embedded GPS sensors and Wi-Fi positioning systems. Unfortunately, as we know all too well, today’s 911 systems do not have access to that device-generated location information.

Takeaways from the CES Show and Why it Matters for Public Safety Communications

The Consumer Technology Association’s International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) wrapped up earlier this month in Las Vegas, and 911 and public safety communications should be paying attention now more than ever before.

Shooting Death Underscores Urgent Need for Action on Swatting Incidents

Swatting, the practice of falsely reporting an emergency to elicit a response from a police department’s special weapons and tactics (SWAT) team, is not a new phenomenon for the 911 community.

What is new is that a death has occurred as a result of a swatting incident.

On December 28, 2017, a dispute between online gamers turned ugly. Media reports say that one group, seeking retribution for some perceived wrongdoing, contacted a known swatter in Los Angeles and convinced him to act on their behalf. The swatter placed a call, spoofing his telephone number, to an administrative line at city hall in Wichita, Kansas, and a security guard transferred the call to 911. The caller told the 911 telecommunicator that he had shot his father in the head, was holding his mother and sister at gunpoint, had doused the house with gasoline, and was contemplating setting the building ablaze.

The telecommunicator dispatched a police response to the address provided by the caller. When police arrived, a 27-year-old man answered the door, and immediately was told to raise his hands and walk toward the officers. Regrettably, he lowered his hands to his waist, and an officer found the action threatening enough to fire a single shot at the man, killing him.

When one stops to mull this for a moment, especially considering the type of response that is dispatched to such incidents, it seems amazing that a swatting death has not happened before.

As if this event wasn’t tragic enough, the man had nothing to do with the online gaming dispute. In fact, he reportedly wasn’t a gamer at all—the swatter had provided a wrong address for the actual swatting target.