System Tracks Cell Phone 911 Calls
(Southwest Times Record, July 6, 2004)
By Amy Sherrill
TIMES RECORD ASHERRILL@SWTIMES.COM

When cell phone users in Fort Smith and Sebastian County call 911, their location information pops up on a map on a computer screen allowing emergency personnel to find the caller more quickly than before.

The same goes for land-line phones in residences, buildings, businesses and phone booths.
Recently, the city and county began using microData GIS, a map display software, as they implemented Phase II wireless Enhanced 911 technology.

The percentage of cell phone calls in the area has increased consistently during the past several years, keeping with the national trend, said Cpl. Steve Hockaday, who works as a Geographic Information System analyst at the Fort Smith Police Department.
A recent analysis of 911 calls from cell phones showed some surprising results, he said.

"We went through and did a three-month study and found that it was 56 percent which surprised us and well as several other people," Hockaday said. "There was one month, specifically, during the last year that was 71 percent."

Sebastian County had similar results, but the figures don't resemble the number of emergencies, said Rusty Myers, assistant executive director of Western Arkansas Planning and Development District.

"When somebody sees an accident on the Interstate, you don't get one cell phone call on it," Myers said. "You get 10 because everybody calls on it. It doesn't mean that the number of 911 incidents is higher, it's that they get multiple calls when they get a cell phone deal."
Phase I provides a 911 call center with the telephone number of a cell phone caller and oftentimes the location of a cellular tower nearest to the caller. Phase II provides the call center with the capability of receiving the telephone number as well as latitude and longitude of a cell phone caller. This information helps emergency personnel such as police or paramedics locate the caller quickly.

The cost for the setup and implementation was more than $100,000. A portion of that money is provided by the 50-cent surcharge on monthly cell phone bills.

Carmen Bryant, administrator for the Arkansas Commercial Mobile Radio Service, or wireless 911, said during the first quarter of the year $760,000 was divided among 66 counties in Arkansas. That money is used only for administrative costs. The other portion of the surcharge is sent back to wireless carriers for operational costs as it relates to 911. Bryant said checks to carriers for this quarter total in excess of $2.5 million.

"That 50 cents a month that everyone pays for their wireless 911 service is collected by the carriers and it comes into the board, and the board handles and distributes all that money," Bryant said.
Fort Smith began addressing every point in the city down to the apartment level in Global Positioning System in September 2001. The information was put into a mapping program. The laborious process took six months, and then inspecting the information took another six months.

"Your Phase II information is only as good as the GIS data that you put into it," Hockaday said.

There are between 40,000 and 41,000 points including residences and businesses that were addressed by police officers and other city employees, Hockaday said.

The Western Arkansas Planning and Development District contracted by Sebastian County plotted nearly 11,000 points in Sebastian County excluding the city of Fort Smith, said Rusty Myers, assistant executive director of WAPDD.

Myers believes the steps the city and county have taken in upgrading their technology are remarkable.

"That by itself, even if you set aside the cell phone thing altogether, is significant because before, all they got was an address. ... But they certainly didn't get a map on the screen showing exactly where that structure's located so that they could be able to say to the emergency service provider, take a right here, take a left here, and it's the third house on the left," Myers said.

Hockaday agreed, saying that the city is leaps and bounds ahead of where it used to be.

"There are a lot of people that we'll be able to locate through Phase II technology," Hockaday said. "It's impressive. You think about this 10 years ago; we would have never thought about trying to do something like this."

Hammond provided a specific example of the improvements.

"Just the other day we had a call where a lady called in and it was a cell phone and it sounded like she just dialed 911 on it and then set it down, but you could tell that she and a man were arguing ... having a fight," Hammond said. "Back with the old system we would have never been able to find them. With the new system we were able to determine exactly where she was and go right to her."
However, there are limitations, specifically when a person uses an older-model cell phone to make the call. The phone may not be GPS capable. Also, sometimes in buildings, signals are lost and the information is not transmitted to the call center.

"Like everything else, it's not perfect," Hammond said. "Sometimes it just won't be there for whatever reason, so you have to go back to the old way and just call the cell phone number back and hopefully get the information from the caller then."
Sam Neff, communications coordinator for the Sebastian County Sheriff's Office, said there are other benefits to the mapping software beyond pinpointing the caller on a map.

"Also, now this map is expandable to us and we can drag it and we can see what's all around it, so if you need directions to getting to where that call is, now then, you've got your streets," Neff said.

The mapping software also has aerial photographs that allow emergency personnel to see the topographical information. This was used recently in Sebastian County when a suspect tried to run over a sheriff's deputy on Glass Plant Road and then fled into a wooded area.
Fort Smith police personnel utilized the technology to pull up addresses of people living near a sex offender in order to mail them a notification of their new neighbor. Prior to that, police officers spent hours knocking on doors in neighborhoods where a sex offender moved to.

While the new technology is helpful and puts emergency workers in better position to aid someone in need much more quickly, the 911 operator's map screen is dependent on the quality of the GIS data - meaning GIS data requires constant maintenance in order to provide accurate information to the call taker, Fort Smith and Sebastian County authorities said.

"Phase II provides the x and y coordinates - latitude and longitude," Bryant said. "They're talking down the road about providing the z coordinate, which is the altitude. That would make a difference like in high-rise buildings or up there in the mountains, but that is not part of the mandate."