At a meeting of the Dallas City Council on Wednesday, council members moved to accept a federal grant of taxpayer money that will be used to upgrade the city’s 911 technologies in order to comply with a state mandate.
In 2021, the State of Texas enacted a law that would fund the replacement of 911 systems across the state. The new systems are supposed to allow for “data rich content” to be received from smart devices and enable “interoperability” across different jurisdictions, according to the Texas Commission on State Emergency Communications (CSEC).
“The [legacy] 911 infrastructure is based on wireline technologies established decades ago and uses outdated systems to deliver 911 calls and location information to the [Public Safety Answering Points],” reads the CSEC’s planning document for the transition.
Council members voted unanimously in favor of the resolution, which called for receiving $4,295,000 in taxpayer money and authorized spending by the Office of the City Manager to initiate the required upgrades.
Still, it is unclear what impact completion of the integration will have on the Dallas Police Department’s response times, which have been growing higher recently, likely due to a shortage of police officers in the field.
As previously reported in The Dallas Express, police response times have been on the rise over the last year or so, with low-priority calls going unanswered by officers for as long as 7.5 hours. Shockingly, response times for calls about random gunfire have been averaging 272.1 minutes, up from 2022’s average of 267.6 minutes.
On top of having fewer officers on the street, DPD has also struggled to keep its 911 dispatch division fully staffed. However, last year saw significant improvements, with dispatchers clocking an average wait time of two seconds in December 2022, as previously reported in The Dallas Express.
