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Comment by kyshoc | Hacker News Reader

The main challenge is reliably localizing callers to the right 911 dispatch... without allowing anyone to spoof their origin, and without inadvertently allowing location data to leak out to non-emergency calls (or texts, or tweets, or whatever emergency medium this scheme would support).

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I doubt that. That's a very critical feature for a small subset of emergency calls, where the victim is the one making the call and is unable to communicate their location. But in the majority of cases, something as simple as a text message like "armed robbery at $address" or "fell down stairs at $location" should suffice.

Maybe that would increase the number of prank calls, but maybe that's worth the price.

You overestimate human rationality in emergency situations. Last time I was calling for an ambulance, I had a hard time giving my own damn home address, and I've been living here for decades.

Callers never talk to dispatchers. Call takers take reports and provide information to dispatchers.

For smaller towns (one I know of being a population of ~6k) callers speak with the dispatcher.

I guess it varies from place to place. A lot of small town police departments are dispatched from a larger center. In those set ups, one dispatcher will be in charge of dispatching a channel, which represents a geographical area with a certain number of units working at any particular time. Their job is to read reports coming in, ask any questions they have to the call taker, and coordinate all units on their channel. It’s a very hectic job, and an emergency call can easily take more than 30 minutes to complete. They have to be coordinating units constantly, if you’re getting more than one call concurrently, there’s no way a dispatcher could do both.

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