Why 9-1-1 Needs Us

Many of the volunteers and board members of the Denise Amber Lee Foundation were related to or very close to Denise and her family. We gathered around in fog of grief and anger, and thought that our tragedy must certainly be isolated.

After doing more research, we learned two things: that it was not an isolated incident, and that the 9-1-1 system needs our help.

• An estimated 240 million calls are made to 9-1-1 in the U.S. each year.*
  They are undermanned, and underpaid. And there are no national training standards on how to handle those calls.
• There are nearly 10,000 call centers throughout the country.*
  That's 24,000 calls per call center, which puts it at over 65 calls per day. That's a relentless, high stress environment, and the caretakers on the other side of the phone need to be recognized for the difficult job they do. Currently, most 9-1-1 operators make about the same as the average restaurant cook.
• The system is not unified, in training, in standards, even in communicating to other agencies.
  "When a caller dials 9-1-1, the call is routed to the local public safety answering point. However, if the caller is attempting to notify authorities in another jurisdiction of an emergency in that area, the process can be complicated. For example, a caller in Dallas, Texas aware of an emergency occurring in Little Rock, Arkansas would have access to 9-1-1 only in Dallas, whose dispatchers may or may not know how to contact the proper authorities in Little Rock. The publicly posted phone numbers for most police departments in the U.S. are non-emergency numbers that often specifically instruct callers to dial 9-1-1 in case of emergency, which does not resolve the issue for callers outside of the jurisdiction. In the age of both commercial and personal high speed Internet communications, this issue is becoming an increasing problem." (from Wikipedia)
• No technology standards. In some areas, triangulation makes it possible to get an accurate idea of where a user on a cell phone is (similar to GPS), however some areas only know what cell phone tower the person is calling from (which could be many miles off course). Some 9-1-1 centers now have the ability to receive text messages, some even with plans to implement pictures/video (imagine if officers could know EXACTLY what they are heading towards), but then other centers have computers that are far out of date. In addition to compensation and training standards, there needs to be unification in technology as well. What happens if someone texts to 9-1-1, but are just out of jurisdiction? Would they even know that nobody heard his/her cry for help?