California Slowly Moving 911 Calls to Local Centers

The California Highway Patrol (CHP) has been bearing the burden of handling the state’s wireless 911 calls ever since the first cellular call was made, but now local agencies are now slowly taking over the task of answering the calls. During a CAL-NENA conference presentation in February, state wireless E911 coordinator Jim Thompson said California residents dialed 9-1-1 24.8 million times during 2008, and 62% of those were wireless. Since most of the early cellular calls were made from vehicles, by law the CHP was assigned to field 911 calls. But now up to 16% of households are wireless-only, meaning that many cellular 911 calls are for incidents occurring off the highways, and in local jurisdictions.

The state is making progress in pushing wireless 911 calls to where they should be answered–the local comm centers. Thompson said wireless carriers are working to identify where their 98,365 antenna sectors should route 911 calls, and 93% of local PSAPs have signed on to accept the calls directly. Besides eliminating time-consuming call transfers, direct handling of 911 calls will make a change in 911 call distribution.

A state analysis shows that transfers are reduced dramatically: before local agencies began taking calls, up to 45% of 911 calls to the CHP were transferred. For those agencies who began taking their own calls, the CHP transfer rate dropped to just 15%. The abandoned call rate also decreased–at one site it dropped from 13% to just 4% of all 911 calls made.

Startingly, Thompson said that right now, the CHP is handling 51,382 calls to 911 per dispatcher workstation, while local PSAPs are handling just 8,946 calls per workstation, or 15% of the CHPs workload. Overall, the CHP is handling 73% of the state’s wireless 911 calls, and local agencies just 27%. But that percentage is slowly shifting. Download (pdf) Thompson’s presentation for more insights into the state’s wireless 911 program, or the program’s Web page for complete information on the shift from CHP to local comm centers.

This chart below shows that CHP dispatchers are handling many more wireless 911 calls per-workstation than local comm center dispatchers.

The wireless 911 call volume has been increasing every year, and more cellular handsets are deployed, and more users rely on their cellular phone for all telephone communications.

Just 60% of wireless 911 calls are identified with Phase II data in California, which means that accurate routing of the calls to the appropriate local agency is more difficult.