Emergency Call Handling using NG911 Additional Data
I was reading an interesting article over breakfast this morning that brought me back to an article that was written at the beginning of this year by Mark Gomez of the Mercury News. It seems that even the police are dealing with the issue of false alarms, not from vehicles necessarily, but from businesses. With nearly 12,000 all the alarms that occurred in 2010, 98.4% turned out to be false alarms.
With today's ever shrinking public safety budgets, and citizens demanding that police do more with less, the $662,203 that police say cost them to respond to these alarms is a huge burden to carry. Some may say that finds for repeated
false alarms should be implemented, and in fact San Jose does have a policy for that. However those fines, $466,633 worth, still even 30% deficit over the cost.
San Jose Police Chief Chris Moore wrote that "the primary purpose of police is to respond to reported crimes, preventive patrols and community policing, and the practice of responding to all audible alarms does not accomplish any of those goals." It also should be noted that Moore's department has also been hit with a 20% decrease in resources in the past two years and has been forced to scale back other operations to maintain patrol levels
.
This is an area where public safety can utilize some intelligent workflow concepts that are used in day to day enterprise contact center, that streamline the communications interaction between the caller and the call taker.
For example, San Jose reacted to the increase in audible alarms in an all or nothing manner, based on statistical data that they had.
- 98.4% of audible alarms are false
- False alarms are audible alarms
- Audible alarms do not require police response
The problem with the logic is that audible alarms, are associated with false alarms. When in fact the logic should be that 98.4% of false alarms are businesses do not manage their alarm system properly. The missing statistic is what part of all the alarm systems are represented by the businesses creating false alarms. It could be the classic case of one bad apple spoiling the entire bunch.
What needs to happen in the 911 center is a correlation of the origination point of the emergent event, with details of the event if available, and some history on previous event outcomes. Using this prioritization intelligence, we don't necessarily have to deny service to any one particular caller, or event originator, but during times of overload we can effectively manage and prioritize inbound call traffic based on additional information.
Next-generation 911 will make further use of this additional information, and in fact, there is a specific workgroup that is dealing with this very topic.
This is not new technology. This is not a new idea. This is something that's been done in the enterprise space, in some of the largest call centers in the world, for the past 10 to 15 years. It's only because we've had a 40+-year-old architecture in our nations emergency services network, and we've been handcuffed with using caller ID or ANI as our sole index to additional information, and that additional information has been limited to a Street address, that we haven't deploy these common call handling methods to public safety.
Sure, public safety is experiencing a budget crunch each and every year. But guess what? The economy is been tanking for the last 10 years, and businesses have been forced to get lean and mean. One of the primary ways that a public facing company can minimize their expense of "customer contact", is to use technology to streamline that interaction and minimize the expense of that interaction.
In order for public safety to survive, we will have to either shovel more money into the furnace, or get a more efficient furnace that burns less money. In my opinion, the latter provides a more efficient environment for public safety, more services for the public they serve, and an evolution path that brings the current emergency services network at of the dark ages.
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