CASE STUDY

9-1-1 Who Will Answer Your Call?

9-1-1 Who Will Answer Your Call?

Introduction

This is a review of 9-1-1 public safety dispatching in Minnesota. By law, counties in Minnesota have been responsible for establishing 9-1-1 emergency telephone systems, either individually or jointly with other counties. The public employees who take the calls and dispatch the appropriate emergency response agencies have different titles around the state to reflect their varying duties, but in this report we refer to all of them as dispatchers (Rasmussen 2009). The main chapter that need to be focused for the research is Companionship. The main theme of the book is based on the emergency line use of 9-1-1. The report is based on the analysis of the case that has been given in the chapter and the study discusses the answers of all the questions that has been asked in the end of the case study.

Answer 01

As a consequence, the evolution of the emergency response system has set the stage for further potential developments in public safety but also in security, as the system has created a landscape that is far more legible than it was before that day in 1968. In what follows, we more fully describe these changes in the emergency response system, and articulate the implications of those changes. We do so in three sections. First, we brie?y describe the evolution of the 9-1-1 system, from basic 9-1-1 to Enhanced 9-1-1 (or E9-1-1) and ?nally to the Federal Commerce Commission (FCC)- mandated, currently deploying Wireless E9-1-1 Phase II. Second, we describe the way in which the development of the E9-1-1 system has been involved in a process through which the landscape is rendered more legible, and in which the authority to maintain that legibility has moved into the hands of organizations whose primary concern is with both safety and security (Burau 2007). Finally, we turn to wireless 9- 1-1. Much in the news, it has to many people raised concerns that they couch in the language of privacy. We argue, though, that when seen against the background of an increasingly legible landscape, of the change of the locus of control of the addressing system, and of the continuing process of what we call function creep, wireless 9-1-1 raises a set of concerns than cannot be simply seen as matters of privacy. This in addition raises concerns about civil liberties more generally, and about the possibility of new and more sophisticated forms of technologically mediated discrimination (Rasmussen 2009).

Answer 02

The time it takes for a responder to arrive after your call depends on several factors. All calls are given a priority that is based upon the incident type and whether or not the incident is still in progress. The priorities are predetermined by the responding agencies themselves, not 9-1-1. Other factors are: weather conditions, how far the unit is from the incident, and how busy the agency is at the time (Rasmussen 2009). As a result, calls that are not a high priority may wait until a ...