Some groundbreaking improvements are coming to Connecticut’s 911 system.
Some groundbreaking improvements are coming to Connecticut's 911 system.
The ability to text to 911 has been around for several years now, and hopefully soon, that will include texting photos and videos to 911.
There are some local 911 centers in Connecticut where you can text photos and videos to 911, but not many.
This potential upgrade would make that available statewide.
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For seven years now, our statewide first responder network has used the Next Generation 911 platform to enable people to text 911.
The first version of Next Generation 911 has the infrastructure in place, but not the ability to allow people to text photos and videos to 911 The next version of software is going to allow that.
Emergency Telecommunications Manager Stanley Dombrowski explained the upgrade would be “using a secure link to the caller, the caller can send videos and pictures of the incident to be viewed on the console, to better understand the nature of the event.”
Investigations
Software upgrades also include geofencing, where critical incident managers could set up a virtual perimeter around the geographic location of a major incident, to direct all calls from this geofenced area to a specific set of call takers.
“I see this as a potential way to free up dispatchers from answering multiple calls regarding the same event and be better able to respond to other non-related events occurring at the same time,” Dombrowski said.
Other improvements include automatic language conversion of incoming texts, voice transcriptions of 911 calls, and more precise mapping of caller locations.
This rollout should take place in about a year and a half.
