Police from Greater Manchester in the U.K.  have completed a 24-hour experiment to record every incident they deal with on Twitter. Their aim was to give the public a better idea of the demands made upon them. So what does it reveal about the realities of policing one of the UK’s biggest cities? There is a saying in England that a policeman’s lot is not...

A rapper is tying up police emergency lines by bombarding a UK police department with nuisance calls. He dials 999 before rapping to operators at Greater Manchester Police – who are required to treat each call as a potential emergency call until they can be sure otherwise. Despite officers blocking more than 60 SIM cards, the man has plagued them since January...

A UK ambulance service recently recieved adverse publicity following the death of a woman who fell 12 feet after their computerized call priority system failed to prioritize the call correctly. The prioritization system, which originates here in the U.S.A. was, it is claimed, not able to identify the woman’s situation as life-threatening. An investigation by a Sunday...

In the U.K. a paramedic has recently been jailed for 12 months after lying about why he did not try to resuscitate a 30-stone man. The paramedic, Karl Harris, 45, told jurors it was “physically impossible” to help 59-year-old Barry Baker after he collapsed at home in Brighton, East Sussex. Prosecutors allege Mr Harris told his colleague Ben Stokes not to bother...

The age old dispatch problem of locating callers was the focus of an article that recently appeared on the website Fierce Wireless on January 25th. A company called WirelessWERX has developed an in building location system using bluetooth enabled mobile devices. The full Firece Wireless article can be found here, but the quest for automated location systems raises some...

The dispatcher’s behind may be a health hazard to public safety. No, this isn’t a disparaging remark aimed at the intellectual abilities of dispatchers across the nation, I’m talking about THE dispatcher’s behind, the collection of tissue that is right now probably nestled between your pelvic bone and a chair. Actually, it isn’t really your...

As aid begins to flow in Haiti there has been interest in the ability of social network systems to remain operational,to some degree, while the more traditional networks have failed in the devastation. Besides services like Twitter, and to a certain extent SMS, allowed brief messages in and out, use of  Skype has also been evident particularly by news outlets. The ability...