Technology

I work in a 911 dispatch center, were starting to do some remote trials, but I'm not part of the test group, so I'm not totally clear on all the details about how we're handling it.

But some concerns I'd have are

1. Backup power supplies, phone and Internet connections, etc. our dispatch center has massive generators, several redundant phone and Internet lines, etc. You wouldn't want to be on the phone with your call taker and have your call drop in the middle because there's a storm and they just lost power or Internet to their home.

2. Radio equipment- phones and call taking are only half the game, the other half is on the radio with our field units. If somehow everything else goes offline, the dispatchers still have walkie talkies to communicate with the units in the field.

3. Security concerns, both physical and cyber. We're handling a lot of sensitive information, have access to various local, state, and federal databases, etc. I'd be a little sketched out by some of that going over someone's home WiFi. Yes, you can do a lot with vpns and virtual machines and such, but it still introduces a whole lot of variables that need to be accounted for. Also if something really crazy happens, most dispatch centers are fairly secure places, I personally work in a underground bunker on the property of a prison, tall fences, armed security, multiple security doors, etc. You also have less control over who is in the room and what they're doing. We're not allowed to take any pictures or video in the room, some dispatch centers go so far as you can't have your cell phone out at all, no one can just walk in unless they have business in there, it's a pretty controlled environment.

4. Physical proximity to other people is useful, we're always turning around and asking other people sitting near us for help with something or another, whether it's asking them to call another agency while we're on the phone with someone, look something up for us, asking them how to do something in the computer (there's a lot going on in our system, and they're constantly adding and changing how some things work, so I'm not sure anyone really knows how to do everything off the top of their head.) If our computer freezes up while taking a call, we can still yell across the room to the dispatcher that they need to send someone to a location because something is going on there (there's a famous story in our dispatch center from a few decades ago when we were first getting computerized where someone called in that a cop was getting beaten up and couldn't get to his radio, the person taking the call couldn't find the location in the system and had to yell over to the dispatcher for that zone to get backup started for him over the radio.) Also about half of us are working night shift and our hours are long, having people around you and keeping an eye on each other is some easy insurance to make sure no one's literally falling asleep on the job.

5. Space for the computer equipment. Where I work, call takers have 5 monitors, dispatchers have 6, and we make use of all of them, we have a lot of information we're constantly shifting through, and all those screens are very useful to us, we could, in a real pinch, make do with 2 or 3 screens, but it would be a pretty big hindrance. I don't have space in my home to squeeze in a 5 or 5 screen setup, and I wouldn't really want to work without them long term (once in a while we've had to use aour backup center which has 1 fewer screen at each console, and it's a pretty big pain in the ass)

Some of these are weird edge cases, but that's also kind of exactly the sort of situations that 911 exists for. I do think if done right working from home can add extra redundancy, hypothetically if someone blows up our dispatch center or something it's better if half of us aren't even in the building and can continue working, but on the other hand if there's widespread power and Internet outages, it doesn't do us any good to have half of our staff sitting at home in the dark either. There's a balance to be struck, I'm not totally sure what it is, but it's something that needs to be approached carefully to make sure we're still able to provide an acceptable level of service.