By Rachel Weaver, Pittsburgh Tribune Review
Original publication date: Aug. 28, 2011

Communications officials are working to enable people to use cell phones to summon emergency help, but that could produce a learning curve for users and 911 dispatchers, they caution.

The Federal Communications Commission this month announced preliminary plans to allow people to send text, picture and video messages to dispatchers. The changes, dubbed Next Generation 911, are overdue, said Audrey Kenny, Pennsylvania president of the Association of Public Safety Communications Officials and director of Bucks County 911.

“The infrastructure in place today was designed in the 1960s,” Kenny said. “It needs to be modernized to match the technology available.”

The FCC has not established a timeline for implementing the changes, but communications officials have talked about adding messaging capability to the 911 system since the early 2000s, said Gary Thomas, 911 coordinator for the Allegheny County Department of Emergency Services.

Recent events, such as the April 2007 massacre of 32 people on the Virginia Tech campus, pushed it to the forefront, he said.

“A lot of this came out with the Virginia Tech shootings. A lot of people were trying to text 911 so they wouldn’t give their location away to the gunman,” Thomas said.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said the Next Generation 911 system should be operational across the nation by 2020.

“The first thing to focus on is identifying ways it can be done as inexpensively as possible,” he said.

The idea of using technology in this fashion is no longer futuristic, Genachowski said. “The world has changed dramatically,” he said.

Kenny points to the attacks in Norway in July. Norwegian extremist Anders Behring Breivik, 32, is charged with setting off a car bomb in Oslo that killed 8 people and terrorizing an island summer camp two hours later, shooting and killing 69.

“If someone made a noise, they were picked out,” she said. “It’s scary, but it’s a situation that’s a reality for people now.”

The FCC hasn’t decided how to pay for the upgrades, and that makes some local departments apprehensive.

“We’ll have to have at least one dispatcher dedicated to just Next Generation,” said Dan Stevens, public information officer for the Westmoreland County Department of Public Safety. “It’s going to be some education, definitely some new equipment. With the current situation on funding, it could be additional tax dollars.”

At this point, the changes are “pie in the sky,” said Andy Quayle, Munhall police dispatcher and CEO of Tubu Internet Solutions, an IT support company. No one has answered fundamental questions about how dispatchers would receive messages, he said. “Will it come to e-mail? Someone’s phone?”

About 53 percent of calls to Westmoreland County 911 are made by cell phone, Stevens said. Dispatchers cannot pinpoint exact locations of callers on cell phones and, at best, GPS trackers in phones provide a 180-feet radius, he said. Unless someone gives an exact address in a text, video or picture message, emergency responders might not find it.

Stevens worries that people might text when they could safely call. “It’s always better to talk to a person. There are questions we can ask.”

Dispatchers often gain valuable information from the way a person speaks or background noises, said Dan Boehme, Munhall crime prevention officer. “You don’t get that with a text,” he said.

Text-speak — lingo such as “OMG” and “BRB” ? is a hurdle because not everyone is fluent, Quayle said. “Things are abbreviated to the point that you can’t understand.”

That means dispatchers would “learn a new language,” said Kenny, noting, “There are a lot of shortcuts. Autocorrect (of words) is an issue in the smartphones.”

Still, Brian Colosimo, 45, a member of Sto-Rox Neighborhood Watch, sees the changes as a “step forward,” pointing to the power of photos.

“It won’t just be, ‘Somebody in a blue shirt,’ ” he said.

Moon police Chief Leo McCarthy agrees that photos could “dramatically increase the probability of apprehending someone.”

“Human beings are frequently mistaken,” he said. “If we have something tangible to look at, the accuracy is going to be much higher.”

Boehme said people should reserve texts for non-life-threatening situations.

“If someone broke into your house and you texted so no one would hear it ? if something happens to you after that, we don’t know,” he said. “When you call 911, we can hear gunshots, screams, things that clue us in to what’s going on.”

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