Deluged With 911 Calls, DC Encourages 311; Spending $10M on NG-911
Deluged with some 1.5 million 911 calls annually, Washington, D.C., is again encouraging nonemergency police calls via 311, an FCBA tour of the city’s emergency call center was told Thursday. The center's approximately 200 911 operators and staff were “spending…
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so much time on 911” for nonemergency situations, it reverted to urging people to call 311 to reach police non-urgently, said a spokesperson for the D.C. Office of Unified Communications. The nonemergency 311 city services number at OUC, with about 100 employees, gets about 2 million calls a year and also runs at all times. “We’ve done stuff on social media,” and are working with a company to possibly promote 311 to reach police when it's not an emergency, she responded to our question. A direct mail campaign is possible, she added. Between 20 and 30 percent of 911 calls aren’t emergencies, she noted. D.C.'s work with RapidSOS to better locate wireless callers (see 1808080016) appears to be achieving intended results, another official told us. “That’s been a huge game changer” and is “awesome,” the spokesperson said. She also noted that in the city, Uber passengers can use the app to notify the office of an emergency. She said such a feature could conceivably also come from Lyft. That company wouldn't comment on whether its app will allow similar. Lyft works "hard to design policies and features that protect our community" and looks "for ways to improve," a spokesperson emailed. "In the rare event that drivers need to call 911, they can do so from within the app, which will display the driver’s current location and vehicle information, including license plate number, making it easy for them to tell 911 dispatchers the details." OUC has completed three of five phases of moving to next-generation 911, and is about 80 percent along the multiyear initiative, Director Karima Holmes told the group. She said the initiative costs about $10 million. “We’ve done a lot of infrastructure work," she said. OUC has been able to get texts in emergencies for a few years, but "we don't get a lot," the spokesperson said.