The Phoenix Police Department handles more than half a million non-emergency calls every year. And 911 dispatchers were juggling both those and emergency calls. But that’s about to change later this week with the help of AI.
Last year, Vice Mayor Ann O’Brien requested that the city and the Police Department look at AI to handle calls to Crime Stoppers, which is the non-emergency number.
"And more and more people were telling me about extraordinarily long wait times. And if we were lucky, they would stay on hold and get answered, but often residents were getting so frustrated. They were hanging up, which means things weren't getting reported," she said.
O’Brien also heard that 911 dispatchers were getting stressed at the number of non-emergency calls waiting to be answered.
"And so an already stressful job was becoming even more stressful by having this backlog. We have more vacancies than we would like to have in the dispatcher department, so it just kept compounding the problem," O'Brien said.
The system is set to go live this Wednesday. It works in 36 languages and quickly identifies why someone is calling, then routes the caller to the right resource.
O’Brien said callers will always have the option to talk to a live person.
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