By Kimberly Veklerov, San Francisco Chronicle
Richmond now boasts the first emergency dispatch center in Northern California to accept 911 texting, but officials warn that in most cases the finger-typing smartphone messages are no substitute for old-fashioned landline voice calls.
Dispatchers believe the new system will be particularly helpful to people with hearing or speech impairments, who previously had to go through a third party to report emergencies. Victims of domestic violence or kidnapping also may benefit from the texting option, but dispatchers urge the community at large to use the service only in instances when a voice call would put their lives in peril.
“We’ve all gotten calls where someone says something like, ‘I can’t talk right now, Aunt Betty,’ and we know something’s not right,” said Michael Lusk, a Richmond Police Department dispatcher who has taken about six 911 text messages since the service went live at the end of January. In situations where callers are not at liberty to describe aloud what’s happening, he said, texting may prove useful.
But voice calls to 911 have an array of benefits that text messages do not, officials say. For one, it’s much faster for dispatchers to elicit answers over the phone, and calls from landline phones immediately inform dispatchers of the caller’s location. Background noise, too, is particularly useful in assessing an emergency and can later be entered into evidence in court, dispatcher say.
“If placing a voice call is going to endanger yourself or others, please text us,” said Deana Norton, a communications shift supervisor for the Police Department. She added that texting the location of the emergency is crucial.
To report an emergency via text, users simply type 9-1-1 into the space where a friend’s phone number would usually go. On the other end of the signal, dispatchers log into a website where they can view texts sent to 911. The screen, which resembles a chat messaging platform, has a drop-down menu for dispatchers to choose prewritten common responses, like “do not move the patient unless it’s absolutely necessary.”
Richmond Police Department’s 911 center, which takes about 20,000 calls each month, also serves San Pablo, El Cerrito, Kensington and Contra Costa College, according to Michael Lambton, a communications shift supervisor. Some cellular towers, though, bounce 911 text messages from Kensington to cities that do not accept them.
Since Richmond launched the technology, dispatchers have received fewer than a dozen texts to 911. Most weren’t emergencies — Norton recalls a music complaint — though Lusk answered a text reporting shots fired.
Jung Pham, an attorney with Disability Rights California, applauded the new technology. He recalled hearing a story from a deaf woman whose husband was suffering from a medical condition in one room, but her TTY phone to connect with a dispatcher was in another room. Those kinds of scenarios, he said, would greatly improve with the ability to text 911 so that the caller can stay with the patient.
In late January, about 475 of 6,000 call centers in the country reported to the Federal Communications Commission that they were using the texting technology.
Richmond began testing the service in November, but needed to wait for T-Mobile, Sprint, Verizon and AT&T to adopt the technology. Those who use other providers are not able to text 911 and will receive an error message, Norton said. And non-English speakers still need to make voice calls to 911, which transfers them to an interpreter.
“We’re hoping that it’s useful for the right people,” Lambton said. “We don’t want people texting 911 with nonemergencies.”
©2016 the San Francisco Chronicle Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.