Illustration by Danny Elchert
In the big, dimly lit room, calm voices overlap.
“OK, I need cross streets.”
“Can I talk to her? Who’s talking in the background?”
“There’s a passenger vehicle northbound on I-55, the passenger car has a small child that’s naked and the driver is hitting this child going down the road.”
“I need an address, not the building.”
“I’m seeing a burglar alarm, Candace Lane, hot tub, glass breakage in the basement, 10-4.”
Sometimes the dispatchers’ voices grow urgent, but they’re never shrill; the only raucous sound is the crunch of two old dot-matrix printers spooling out the panicked callers’ data.
If it’s available.
Today, 70 percent of the emergency calls answered by the St. Louis County Police Department’s 911 call center come from cellphones. If a call breaks off before it can be answered or the caller’s screaming incoherently, the dispatcher has no location or callback number in order to respond. The technology’s there: For the past 10 years, this center’s had the ability to map even a moving cellphone caller’s approximate location and record his or her callback number. But that extra data—“Phase II” in the 911 world—has to be transmitted by the caller’s cellphone company.
And the county hasn’t been able to come to terms with two of the biggest carriers—Verizon and Sprint—to get their
callers’ data.
A sharp ringing shears through the low voices; an alarm’s been triggered.
County 911 coordinator Tom McCormack heads for the printer. The last entry has already been highlighted in yellow by a dispatcher.
“We never answered,” McCormack explains grimly. “Twenty seconds that call was waiting. We were busy. Three people sick today. So the caller hung up. And that sets off an alarm.” Normally, a dispatcher would call right back. But this call came from a Sprint cellphone, and there’s no callback number. No way to know if a child’s trying to save a mother who just collapsed, if a man’s bleeding out, if the call was just a prank or if an older couple’s listening to somebody break into their house.
McCormack walks to the other printer, which spools more data, and points out a land-line call that just came in: “There’s the callback number and the street address, and it’s in Bellefontaine, and here are the emergency services—police, fire, ambulance—that respond to that address.”
He runs his finger along an entry for a Cingular cellphone call: This one does list the Phase II data—the caller’s cell number and the x-y (latitude and longitude) coordinates of the side of the cellphone tower that received the signal. That’s what he needs. With those coordinates, the county system can use two other cellphone towers to triangulate the caller’s general location, coming within several hundred meters in as few as 15 seconds. With those coordinates, the dispatcher can press a button, and the system will zoom in even closer.
Back in 2001 McCormack contacted all the cellphone companies and begged them to provide the county with Phase II data for their clients. There would be costs associated with providing and linking the extra information for each call; McCormack wasn’t even sure how expensive a proposition it would be. He started with Cingular (the nation’s largest carrier, now part of AT&T) and told the company, “You guys’d be the first—it’s a great marketing tool.” Cingular agreed to provide the data—even after learning that St. Louis County couldn’t pay for it—and the other companies followed suit.
All except Verizon and Sprint, the nation’s second- and third-largest carriers.
“I drive to Chicago to meet with Verizon,” McCormack recalls. “I said, ‘You guys are saying it’s my responsibility to pay, and you give me a figure of $350,000 a year. We don’t have that kind of money. You pay us nothing—there’s no tax on wireless—and we’re servicing all your customers.’ They said, ‘You became the customer when you asked for the data.’ I walked out.”
McCormack may have nobility on his side, but Verizon was right. The FCC has since ruled that cellphone companies must make the data available to 911 centers and 911 centers must pay the cost of receiving and decoding it. The Missouri Public Service Commission set that cost at $15 per month per tower—which would have amounted to a yearly total far lower, McCormack says, than the estimates cellphone companies originally gave him. But the county still can’t afford it, he says. The only funding for its 911 service—which serves 20 percent of Missouri’s population and oversees 28 municipal 911 call centers—comes from a 1 percent tax on land lines. And fewer and fewer people have land lines. Revenue in the fund dropped by 41 percent between 2002 and 2006, St. Louis County Chief of Police Jerry Lee informed Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt this August.
Lee was talking to the governor because Missouri is the only state in the country that has not authorized a wireless-phone fee to help defray the cost of answering wireless 911 calls. “We put it on the ballot twice, in 1998 and 2002,” McCormack says. “It started to feel like a losing battle.” At community meetings, he’d ask people why they had a cellphone. “For my kids if they need help,” they’d answer, and he’d just shake his head, bemused by their reluctance to pay a couple of extra cents for that luxury. Then there were the folks who snapped, “I don’t have a cellphone; I’m not payin’.” “You’re right,” McCormack told them, his easygoing temperament sorely tested. “You won’t be paying. It’s a usage tax.”
Both bills were defeated. The number of 911 calls, meanwhile, continues to grow, because just about everyone who passes through or lives in Missouri has a cellphone that can call 911.
In his small glass-walled office, McCormack reaches for a letter pinned to his bulletin board. He’s going back to the state, this time hoping the legislature can pass a bill without putting it up for a popular vote. “We’re asking for funding ‘for any device capable of dialing 911,’” he says. “That’s how we want to word it. Right now VoIP [Voice over Internet Protocol, via computer] doesn’t pay a dime, and cellular doesn’t either, and they’re bound to come out with something else soon.” Last year, when state representatives formed the Interim Committee to Evaluate the 911 System, McCormack drove to Jefferson City for four of their meetings. In December he read their final report with relief. “They are all for it,” he says. “But they have to go back and convince 150 others.”
“Missouri’s … a bit of a special case,” Sprint Nextel spokeswoman Stephanie Worth says carefully. Connecticut’s 911 centers, she points out, switched over to Phase II statewide in a matter of months. But because Missouri has no statewide plan or funding, the 911 system’s more fragmented, with service and systems varying dramatically in different municipalities. In the St. Louis area, 911 calls get switched to AT&T trunk lines, which route the calls and display the caller information, and AT&T charges $15 per tower per month for processing that carrier’s extra Phase II data. “In order to get around these charges, Kansas City actually built out their own system, their own routers,” Worth remarks. K.C. has its own emergency information database, in other words; the city doesn’t rely on AT&T trunk lines.
“It looks like St. Louis County refuses to pay this fee to AT&T,” Worth continues, scanning her notes. “Maybe other carriers have agreed to pay it.” Like Nextel, before its 2005 merger with Sprint. “Er … yes,” Worth says. “And we’re not going to undo anything that’s already been done”—in other words, St. Louis County will continue to receive Nextel callers’ Phase II information. “But the FCC has made it very clear that these charges are the responsibility of the 911 center, not the carrier,” Worth continues. “Really the solution here is the county: They need to figure out how to pay the fees.”
Back at the 911 center, the alarm’s going off again. Another cellphone. The county 911 center doesn’t even have a policy of returning all unanswered cell calls that come in with callback numbers, McCormack admits, because it’s too short-staffed to do so without fail. The 911 budget’s in the red, and the county has been pulling money from its general fund to help support the system. There’s an estimated $12 million windfall coming from an unrelated cellphone-company lawsuit settlement, but according to statements from county counselor Patricia Redington, that money will be used to replenish the county reserve fund. “I’m not going to see any of it,” McCormack predicts gloomily.
Plastic crackles. “You want a Jolly Rancher?” he asks, and bites down hard. He still can’t understand why the last two carriers won’t absorb the costs. “U.S. Cellular just came into the market. They said, ‘How do you want it delivered?’ and I told them, and they said, ‘OK.’ No questions asked. T-Mobile, it was the same thing. Cingular, we already had, and Nextel. So it comes down to Verizon and Sprint.”
Brenda Hill, spokeswoman for Verizon, says St. Louis city is receiving Verizon callers’ data, but St. Louis County is not. “We are just Phase Zero in the county: We give the address of the cell-site tower. We are capable and ready to provide the rest, but St. Louis County needs to pay for that link.”
According to the National Emergency Number Association, more than 75 percent of the nation’s population now lives in areas with Phase II 911 information. The city of St. Louis—which receives nearly one million 911 calls a year, almost three times as many as the county—only readied itself for Phase II data about a year and a half ago. When we went to press, it already had the data from every possible carrier except T-Mobile, which was about to deliver it. The city budgeted to pay its share of those costs from its general fund, explains Jim Garavaglia, asset manager for telecommunications in the comptroller’s office. For 100 towers, he expects to pay about $1,500 a month.
Lt. Dan Howard, commander of the communications division of the St. Louis Police Department, says the effort’s already been rewarded: “We’ve had some success identifying people and getting the police to them, and these were serious incidents.”
The new 911 world is rife with confusion. Until McCormack changed the database, his computers were filling in a tower’s street address as the caller’s location. Emergency vehicles sped to that address—and squealed to a stop in front of a tower.
Now that problem’s fixed, but VoIP presents a new one: Every time a subscriber takes his laptop to Starbucks or moves his PC to a new location, he has to update his information—it doesn’t happen automatically—and that makes routing 911 calls a nightmare. “I’m in a hotel room in California, choking on a chicken bone,” McCormack says, “and the call’s coming back to Ballwin.”
Even if a wireless caller is at home and she’s clearly, carefully giving the dispatcher her address, she’s liable to say, “Florissant” if she lives in an unincorporated area adjacent to Florissant—and without computerized data to correct the misinformation, the dispatcher will switch the call through to Florissant, where someone will send it right back, wasting precious seconds.
“Police work is all timing,” McCormack remarks. He pulls up a patchwork map of northwest St. Louis County, each tiny municipality a different color. “Look at this mess! You get a call: ‘I’m following a drunk, he’s westbound on Interstate 70 from 170.’ Do I send it to Berkeley? Wait, by now he’s in Woodson Terrace. Now unincorporated. Now St. Ann. Now Bridgeton. This is the most unbelievable stretch: six municipalities in three or four miles.”
The alarm beeps again, insistent as a life-support machine. In some ways, it is one. Getting every cellphone company’s client data into their system would give St. Louis County dispatchers a way to respond to callers who can’t give their address—children, people with mental disabilities, people who don’t speak English, people who are too confused, disoriented or panicked to answer clearly, people who are being assaulted and have managed to hit 911 but can’t talk.
Having all the x-y coordinates would also help with the 50 to 70 calls a day that are pranks. Like the kid who called 30 times in a week. “He’d say things like, ‘My dad is beating my mom with a baseball bat.’ He made himself sound like a girl. And he’d cry. We sent firetrucks, ambulances …” They did have x-y coordinates for the kid who called in a bomb threat from the bus on his way to school: McCormack plotted a map for the Olivette police that followed the school bus route, and they figured out which student came from that area. “We caught a kid in University City with the x-y, too,” McCormack says, leaning back. “Figured out he was down on Delmar in the Loop and sent a copper over. He taps on the kid’s shoulder, says, ‘Who are you talking to?’ The kid says, ‘My mom.’ And we’re hearing the whole conversation, had it all on tape.”
It’s fun, nailing the pranksters. What’s not fun is listening to a 911 call from somebody you can’t help.
The city, with its new, complete Phase II data, had not one but two recent cases in which “a woman was being sexually assaulted and had no idea where she was, and she couldn’t talk to us; she was able to dial 911 and then just left her cell open,” Howard says. The city mapped the calls, reaching the women in time to arrest their attackers.
St. Louis County gets calls like that too, from time to time. But if they come from a Sprint or Verizon cellphone, the caller’s out of luck.
