How To Fix 911

The multimillion-dollar 911 call center a the Hamilton County, Indiana, sheriff's office has 24 state-of-the-art, computer-aided dispatch systems. Each operator sits in a plumped-up chair at an ergonomically designed desk on which five large screens simultaneously show call status, caller information, police radio activity and other date — all of which can be shared instantly over radio, phone, Internet, dispatch and cellular systems.

The phone rang at 4

The phone rang at 4:43 a.m. on March 27, 2007. Patty Michaels, a dispatcher at a 911 call center in Belleville, Ill., picked up. On the other end, a woman screamed for help. She said her husband had attacked her. Michaels heard a baby crying in the background. The caller's address appeared on Michaels' screen: it was in O'Fallon, Ill., less than 10 miles away. Michaels asked the woman to confirm it. "That's when it got actually tricky," she says. The caller wasn't in Illinois. She was in South Korea.

That small lapse underlies the fundamental problem of 911: it was developed for landlines back in the days when copper wires ran between a telephone and a central switch. However since 1968, when the first 911 call, a ceremonial test case, rang in Haleyville, Ala., the service has grown to cover 96% of the U.S. and now receives some 240 million calls a year — less than half from landlines in many communities.

The ways we connect to each other

Americans assume we can connect to 911 in all the ways we connect to each other. Our GPS-enabled smart phone, Google and Foursquare may know specifically where we are at any given time, nevertheless unfortunately, these technologies aren't compatible with standard 911. Traditional emergency services don't take texts, photos, Skype calls or videos either. At that time there are social media like Twitter and Facebook, which work when our phones don't. Afterwards the March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, millions of people communicated through social networks when landlines went down and mobile networks were overwhelmed. Within an hour of the earthquake, more than 1,200 tweets a minute were coming from Tokyo, including video updates on the scene. Yet a system like 911 — the first first responder — is out of the loop.(See pictures of crime in Middle America.)

Such gaps leave us with a patchy emergency infrastructure that has become progressively less able to find people in need. Afterwards dispatcher Michaels accepted that the call coming from South Korea was no joke, she was stumped. She couldn't use GPS or subscriber information, and she couldn't access the local telephone carrier for help. Michaels could hear the woman's husband shouting from another room. "I was so afraid we'd be disconnected," she says. "At that time we would never find her."

It took 20 years from that first test call in 1968 for 911 to reach 50% of the U.S. population. At the outset, dispatchers couldn't even tell where calls were coming from. In the end, a set of fixes allowed a caller's phone number to be passed to the 911 center, where it was matched to a street address in the local telephone carrier's database. The upgrade meant that landlines excelled at caller location. At that time phones went mobile.

As cell phones proliferated, old problems resurfaced — except worse. Because the location of cell phones shifts constantly, the "local" 911 call center may change for each call from a given phone. Typically, a call can be routed based on the location of the tower handling it. Nevertheless depending on cellular traffic, that tower may not be the one physically nearest the caller. Recent solutions include using several towers to triangulate the source of a signal or homing in on the phone's GPS. Yet some call centers for all that don't have cellular-call location today, and even the best fixes aren't perfect: it's impossible to triangulate off a straight line of towers in rural America. As for GPS, it presents longitude and latitude, nevertheless 911 centers have no way of getting altitude, so they can't automatically find a caller in a high-rise.