City Backs Off on Wireless 911 Call Handling

After a year of study, the city of Lynchburg (Virg.) has updated its policy on handling wireless 911 calls, hoping to reduce the number of unnecessary responses to hang-up and accidental calls. LynCom center director Bill Alrich says 10 percent of wireless calls are unintentional or hang-ups, or about 12 out of the daily 400 calls that dispatchers receive. Some 911 calls can take 10 minutes to screen, Aldrich says. The current policy requires dispatchers to take “extraordinary measures” to insure that 911 calls are accidental or mistakes. So now, if a 911 call has no voice or audible background noise, and it’s not coming from a TTY or similar device, there will be no emergency response. If the call is a hang-up, the dispatcher will call back the phone once, and if there’s no contact or voicemail, likewise, there will be no emergency response. There is no national standard for handling accidental or hang-up 911 calls. However, the policy seems to be in compliance with guidelines developed by the National Emergency Number Association (NENA) for handling these calls. NENA allows a single callback to hang-ups, and no police response if no contact is made. Their guidelines also generally require evidence of an emergency before taking extraordinary measures to locate the caller. Read more about the new policy here. Download (pdf) the NENA guidelines here.