We seek ways to decrease the number of 911 calls dispatched to police.
Police are the default responders for our 911 system, even when law enforcement is not the best solution. Unfortunately it is hard to know which calls should be diverted to non-police services. Non-standard data hinders comparative analysis and operational flexibility.
"Alternative 911 agencies don’t have the infrastructure or resources they need to play their part in the system. We need a standardized data exchange in order to send and receive calls from 911 to non-law enforcement responders."
~ Alternative Responder Telecom Specialist
Reimagine 911 seeks to identify 911 calls that call-takers can divert to non-police responders. We do this by standardizing 911 data to enable researchers and advocates to perform cross-city comparisons and analysis.
Goals for the 2022 Diagnostic Year
#1 Evaluate Open 911 Data
We evaluated the pros and cons of using openly available 911 information to create a multi-jurisdictional dataset, and what potential that dataset has to support advocates for diverting 911 calls to non-police responders.
#2 Develop a Platform Prototype
We developed a prototype for standardizing 911 calls across multiple cities through volunteer crowdsourcing. Our prototype enables relatively small numbers of volunteers to associate local calls with national standard codes.
#3 Applying Existing Standards
We used the 2019 APCO Incident Code ANSI standard to connect related 911 calls across cities and explored some of the challenges and benefits of using this as our universal standard.
#4 Generate a Multi-City Data Sample
We produced a sample set of standardized, multi-city 911 call data that could be used to vet our hypotheses for impact.
