In the latest issue of Public Safety Communications, an advertiser promotes their Next Generation 9-1-1 products with a photo of an iPhone text message exchange with a public safety answering point (PSAP). Inadvertently, the photo demonstrates the potential pitfalls of text messaging 911, including how to determine a person’s location.
In the exchange, no jurisdiction is mentioned by the person sending the information or the dispatcher. Typically on an iPhone, there is a timestamp indicating when a message arrives. However, that information is missing int the photo. Yet its omission is a reminder text messages can be delayed in transmission by network problems or congestions—or even never delivered at all.
Lastly, in the photo the comm center’s messages are highlighted in green. On an iPhone, messages displayed in green are being sent from iPhone to the other person. That means that in this photo, the dispatcher is the person holding the iPhone, and who used the device to both receive and send the text message. Both technically and procedurally, this would be not be an acceptable method for handling text messages—a dispatcher would have to monitor an iPhone 24 hours a day for emergency messages, and there is no way to record, timestamp or otherwise preserve the 911 text message exchanges.
