City Doesn’t Want Cellular 911 Calls

The city of Long Beach (Calif.) doesn’t want to field its own wireless 911 calls, saying it has a $17 million budget shortage and can’t afford the comm center staffing required to answer the calls promptly. So, like in all cities in the state originally, the calls are routed to the California Highway Patrol’s regional center, in this case in Los Angeles. The routing means that some 911 callers must wait up to 8 minutes for a dispatcher, further delaying an emergency response. No one knows how many additional 911 calls the city’s separate police and fire comm centers would have to field, but one estimate claims the workload would increase 35%. When Los Angeles PD began fielding the city’s wireless 911 calls, dispatchers began fielding four times the number of wireless calls that the CHP had been previously transferring. Read more about the situation here.