Department officials hail the faster response times as proof their strategy to put more cops in patrol cars is working. But the Fraternal Order of Police counters that a rise in murders and shootings shows the patrol officers aren’t doing enough to prevent violent crime.

The average response for a “priority-one” call was 4 minutes in January and February 2011 compared to 3.46 minutes for the same period this year — about 13 percent faster.

Officers are responding more quickly to lower priority calls, too. The average response for a priority-two call fell from 4.94 minutes to 4.21 minutes and 5.63 minutes to 5.4 for a priority-three call, the department said.

A “burglary in progress” is one example of a priority-one call. A report of a burglar alarm going off would be a priority-two call and a burglary that already occurred would be a priority-three call.

Police spokeswoman Melissa Stratton said officers are responding faster to 911 calls because Supt. Garry McCarthy has moved nearly 1,000 officers to street patrols from citywide crime-fighting units and desk jobs. The shift was one of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s campaign pledges.

The department has about 12,000 sworn officers.

Although officers’ response times have gotten faster, 911 calls have shot up this year — along with murders and non-fatal shootings, records show.

Over the first two months of 2011, the city’s 911 center dispatched nearly 630,000 calls compared to about 700,000 over the same period this year, Stratton said.

There were 59 murders in 2011 through March 7 compared to 75 over the same period this year.

Michael Shields, president of the Fraternal Order of Police, said the statistics support his frequent criticism of the department’s strategy of putting more cops in patrol cars.

“There is very little, if any, proactive police work because Chicago Police officers are too busy racing from one 911 call to another,” Shields said.

Stratton responded: “Overall crime is down 11 percent and we are down in every category, with the exception of murder and shootings. We are actively working to address the number of shootings that occur citywide, and as those numbers flatten out, we believe the murder rate will follow.”

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“Anything that disrupts the normal flow of daily life tends to increase the call volume here,” says E-911 Director Paul Hankins.

Sometimes, those calls tie up valuable lines because the issue could be taken care of by using other resources.

“If there is a potential for injury or life threatening problems, then definitely people should call 9-1-1,” says Hankins. ”If it is a power outage, then those calls should be routed to power and light companies.”

However, Hankins says reports of down trees or power lines can cause life threatening situations and should be reported to 911.

“We do need to know about those because it does create a potential for someone running into the tree or going around live power lines. So, we need to get crews out as soon as we can,” says Hankins. “Traffic lights also pose a hazard because if people aren’t careful there could be an accident causing worse environments.”

Lee County 911 also helps reduce the number of emergencies by alerting the public when the weather becomes a serious concern.

“We receive alerts from the National Weather Service. We don’t act on any alerts except for warnings,” he explains.

When a warning is issued, sirens across Lee County are activated letting everyone know to tune in to local weather resources and seek safety.

If sirens go off, Hankins reminds everyone to use 911 only if there is an injury or a life in potential danger.

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MedStar is rolling out a revolutionary change to make patient care more cost-effective, and it all starts with the person taking the call.

Along with the very serious calls MedStar dispatchers answer daily, a lot of people call 911 with very minor medical complaints.

Currently, an ambulance will automatically be sent to any caller.

But under the new 911 nurse triage program, a nurse in the dispatch center will help identify patients who might not need an ambulance ride or a long wait in the emergency room.

In some cases, the caller will be offered a free taxi ride to a clinic.

“Our feeling is, if we can get you an appointment at a clinic or your doctor’s office, or somewhere else, you can wait at home for the clinic appointment time,” MedStar spokesman Matt Zavadsky explained.

In the past 12 years, the ambulance service has responded to more than 100,000 calls. MedStar says 12,000 of them would qualify for this program.

The goal is to save patients money and to free up ambulances for more serious calls that never stop coming in.

“We’re very excited about bringing a revolutionary new method of handling 911 calls to this community,” Zavadsky said.

The pilot program starts in May.

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Last year in Jonesboro, more than 240,000 calls were answered, “Hello, 911, what’s your emergency?” But, now, people calling in an emergency will hear two new voices on the other end of the line.

“They’ll be manning the phones for the 911 and non-emergency lines,” said Jeff Presley, director of E-911, about his recent hires.

The City of Jonesboro set aside about $50,000 to hire two new phone operators. The city decided to separate its radio dispatchers from those answering phone calls, an unusual approach for this area.

“Most dispatch centers, they operate as a joint dispatch-radio operator position,” Presley noted. “What we’re doing is taking the radio away from the call taker.”

Radio dispatchers previously took 911 calls while also relaying messages to emergency personnel, but the new phone operators have taken away some of the stressful balancing act.

“It’s going to take a lot of stress off the 911 dispatchers,” said Johnine Polston, a training officer at E-911. “They’re going to be able to free up their time from actually having to take very many calls and to actually being able to speak to officers, to first responders.”

The new employees began a three-month training process a few weeks ago. They first learn the basics of taking an emergency call, and then graduate onto more specific training.

“Their next steps are going to do some FEMA training,” Polston said. “They’re going to do some ACIC training, level one, in February.”

Polston is teaching the new employees how to best handle the unexpected, but Presley says the job will always keep them on their toes.

“The call takers are going to be very busy,” he said. “If we have a caller that needs help where we need to stay on board with them, the call taker is going to be there for them. Radio operators don’t always have that luxury of staying on the line with someone, so a call taker is going to be a very important part of our operation.”

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For the first time ever, the department is offering medical assistance over the phone.

Dispatchers have been trained to evaluate any emergency and give advice to stabilize the patients.

The new protocol includes a lot of extra questions, and dispatchers want people to know these questions are for your benefit. They’re based on each specific situation so they can help you while an ambulance is on the way.

Kiristy Deblock, the assistant supervisor of Emergency Services, says it’s taken a lot of extra work, but it’s worth it.

“It’s kind of exciting in a way, it makes us feel like we are a little more a part of the process,” she said.

With just a click of a mouse she can bring up a list of questions for any type of emergency.

“Pretty much everything, I can’t think of anything that’s not covered,” said Deblock .

“We’re starting the EMS process a little bit earlier, rather than waiting until the paramedics arrive on the scene,” said Melissa Foster, the deputy director of Emergency Services.

The new program is already paying off. This week, dispatchers helped diagnose symptoms of a stroke.

The call went like this:

Dispatcher – “Ask her to smile.”

Caller – “Baby, just smile.”

Dispatcher – “Was the smile equal on both sides of her mouth?”

Caller – “No ma’am.”

Dispatcher – Tell me what was different.”

Caller – “She didn’t smile on the left side of her face.”

The diagnosis allows first responders to immediately begin treatment. In the past, that wouldn’t have happened.

“The most we could do is just to reassure them that the responders were on the way,” said Foster.

But now, they can give instructions. With a little more on the job training, they say they’ll get even better providing help.

“That’s what this is all about, it’s about the citizens receiving the best service and receiving it as early as possible,” said Foster.

It’s not just about asking questions. Dispatchers have also learned to perform CPR and how to do the Heimlich maneuver so they can better instruct callers who are trying to save a life.

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“Call takers now are given specific information dealing with a particular emergency so that they can transfer that information to callers much more quickly,” police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said at the formal launch of a new $680 million 911 call center.

The new technology at the Brooklyn center will put more information into the hands of the 911 call takers, allowing officials to feed them information about an emergency and automatically showing them a map of the location of each caller. It also will prevent the system from getting overloaded in the event of a catastrophe, city officials said.

In 2004, the federal commission, which was created to study the terror attacks and make recommendations designed to prevent future attacks, concluded that on Sept. 11, 2001, the phone system’s operators and dispatchers were unaware that fire chiefs were evacuating the doomed twin towers because the city had no way of relaying that information.

As panicked people called 911 seeking guidance on how to escape the burning 110-story buildings, the operators answering the phones were able to offer little help, and some told workers not to evacuate. More than 2,750 people were killed in the attack on the twin towers.

The commission concluded that an unknown number of victims might have had a chance of survival if 911 operators had told them not to flee upward, where some found locked roof doors and no hope of escape.

On Thursday, emergency officials said that the new call center is able to support a queue of 1,900 emergency calls — up from 500 in 2001. New switches mean the center can now receive up to 50,000 calls in an hour — an unheard-of number for a system that sees an average of 30,000 calls per day.

Deputy Mayor for Operations Cas Holloway said that since beginning full operations with New York Police Department staffers last month, there already have been improvements.

“It is performing exceptionally, and in fact the number of calls answered in under 10 seconds has gone up by 6 or 7 percent,” he said. “The number of overall calls answered in 30 seconds or less is now at 99.9 percent.”

Mayor Michael Bloomberg said that, under the new system, precious seconds will be saved by requiring most callers to speak to only one operator, instead of repeating information to several. That operator will insert information into the computer system and loop in additional people if necessary, rather than transferring callers to different agencies as was previously done.

The opening of the center was delayed by a few years due to what Holloway said had been problems with the new technology, which had frozen and shut down when handling a large number of calls. Holloway said the problems were fixed by the contractor.

A second phase of the project, now expected to reach completion in 2015 and cost $2.1 billion, up from the $1.4 billion initially projected in 2004, will involve building another call center in the Bronx, to be used as a backup in the case of a catastrophe.

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Love County Sheriff Joe Russell said the new system. which allows emergency services to pinpoint the location of a 911 caller will force all of his dispatchers who work at the jail to move into the new E-911 building three blocks away, since the county doesn’t have the money to hire new employees.

Sheriff Russell said he usually has two jailers working and one dispatcher at the jail at all times, and he fears that inmates will be more likely to try escaping when they find out no dispatchers will be on site to monitor the jail in person. They will only be able to monitor the jail through video surveillance.

“I’d like for them to know what’s going on and the danger we’re looking at. I’m not sure if Love County is the only jail that’s got this problem,” said Sheriff Russell.

But Love County E-911 Coordinator Becky Watkins says the new system should be no reason for concern.

“The protocol will be the same. If something happens in the jail, the dispatchers will be monitoring it, they’ll call for help. They’ll call a deputy in over the radio and tell them to go to the jail or what have you,” Watkins said.

The new E-911 system will begin February 7th for Love County.

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They’re meant to keep people safe, answering calls when people are in need of help.

Vigo County Dispatchers receive thousands of calls a year. Those calls are what help 911 centers accumulate their operating funds for the year.

But recently those funds are starting to dwindle.

Rob McMullen, Director of Vigo County Central Dispatch says, “Every time we lose a land line call or land line call subscriber, that’s 75 cents that’s taken away from our operating budget.”

In 2008 Vigo County Dispatch received thirty-five thousand 911 land line calls.

Every year after that, calls continued to drop significantly.

By 2011 only nineteen-thousand calls were received.

“Over the past four years we’ve lost fifty-thousand 911 landline calls but we’ve gained that many in cell phone calls,” said McMullen.

Vigo Dispatchers say they are seeing an increase in 911 calls from cell phones.

As families look for ways to cut corners in a tough economy, McMullen says land lines are usually first to go.

Cell phone 911 calls give dispatch centers just fifty cents per call but legislation is hoping to raise 911 call prices to help dispatchers out.

“There looking at it, if everything goes through, they’re kind of talking about making it a dollar across the board. A dollar for cell phones and a dollar for land lines,” said McMullen.

Vigo County dispatcher Caleb Manly says that money not only helps them but helps the community.

“The more money we receive, the more new equipment we obviously can get and the newer equipment we can have, the faster we can get people out there and possibly save more lives,” said Manly.

Next time a person dials 911, they might stop and think where that money is actually going and is money well spent.

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The grant from the Health Foundation of Western and Central New York is supporting a range of programs, from wellness classes to home hazard evaluations.

A four-month study of 911 calls conducted earlier this year by the county’s emergency response department yielded a specific profile of people at risk for falling: The most likely person to fall in Tompkins is an 80-year-old woman on more than four medications who sustains relatively minor injuries in a fall in her own living room around 5 p.m., and requires ambulance transportation to the hospital for medical evaluation.

But even relatively minor injuries can be a problem.

“It’s one of those triggers of decline,” said Lisa Holmes, director of the County Office for the Aging. “A fall can certainly lead to a loss of independence, loss of quality of life. When you look at the health care costs of someone who falls, one fall can account for all of the funding of this grant.”

Harris said the grant is in line with her agency’s goal of keeping people in their own homes as long as possible.

Beth Harrington, EMS coordinator and assistant director of Tompkins County emergency response, said that out of 8,379 calls the county emergency dispatch center took in 2010, 1,180, or 14 percent, were because of falls. That’s the largest type of emergency calls out of 34 categories the center tabulates, she said.

Though the calls range from minor spills in which the victim simply needs help getting back on his or her feet, to serious incidents requiring immediate medical help, Harrington said falls are a serious health issue — one that is expected to worsen as the over-65 population grows.

But Harrington said she hopes those numbers will go down in the county, thanks to the $110,000 grant to Tompkins County Health Planning Council to support programs geared toward preventing falls.

Most important is building a set of programs that will outlast the grant, Harris said.

“From the very beginning … we thought of the sustainability of this,” she said. “It’s not going to be a flash-in-the-pan type thing.”

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The program was introduced at Buck Island and Simmonsville Neighborhood meetings, with a news release being published on Nov. 1. A Community Meeting was held on Nov. 5 at the Rotary Community Center building located at Oscar J. Frazier Park. The addressing plan called for correcting improper numbering, eliminating duplicate addresses and naming seven new streets and a total of 92 addresses were affected by this change.

The address post are 4 inches-by-4 inches-by-3 feet slanted posts painted Charleston green with 4-inch reflective numbers and were installed near each homeowner’s driveway making it visible for first responders to locate residents.

The town of Bluffton addressing technician sent notices out to all utility companies (electric, gas, water and sewer and the local telephone company) and the United States Post Office. Also notified were Beaufort County Assessor’s Office, Voters Registration and town of Bluffton staff.

The Beaufort County Enhanced E-911 system is operational, so it is important that each resident notify their local phone company of the corrected address as soon as possible. The next phase of the project will include addresses in the Simmonsville Road area. For additional information, please contact Theresa Thorsen at 706-4577.

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