Michigan PSAP realizes benefits from Rave Mobile Safety two-way 911 text solution

Even when the text functionality does not result in a response—as in the case of a pocket dial—the Smart911Chat communication is beneficial to public safety, according to Todd Miller, Rave Mobile Safety’s vice president of public safety.

“Those pocket dials cost money,” Miller said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications. “If an individual doesn’t respond to a call back, and you don’t have something like Smart911 chat, Ottawa County is going to send an officer, if they have a location.

“In the end, Ottawa County estimates that each one of those unnecessary dispatches costs them about $23—when they look at the officer’s time, time spent from the call-taking side—and that adds up pretty quickly. Those dollars really mean something, especially when all communities are looking at ways to be more efficient and more effective in their public-safety offerings.”

In addition to the financial savings, the Smart911Chat feature that allow pocket-dial callers to dismiss an accidental 911 call can result in better use of precious public-safety personnel, Miller said.

“In many jurisdictions, on an abandoned call, the policy today is, ‘Let’s call them back,’” he said. “Of course, that call comes from a 10-digit number, and people don’t answer the call. Then, protocols in many portions of the country are, if we can’t reach the citizen, let’s send an officer.

“So, with abandoned calls, not only are dispatch centers spending extra time trying to reach these callers that don’t respond, but we’re also wasting valuable first-responder resources—we’re potentially taking them from one location where they are needed to a location where they are not needed, simply because there was a pocket dial.”

Miller said there are many text-to-911 solutions that allow PSAPs to receive emergency texts from citizens, but the Rave Mobile Safety system is the only one that lets PSAP personnel to send an initial text message to a citizen without the citizen needing to download a special application.

“Once the member of the community has elected to proactively text into 911, then 911 can have that two-way conversation [with other text-to-911 solutions],” he said. “But the key piece that is really lacking is putting that power under the control of the PSAPs.

“The PSAPs really need the ability—on their side—to start that two-way conversation, and that’s the biggest difference … Current standards do not address texting the way that Smart911 handles it. Current standards really are focused on that inbound [text] from the citizens.”