When a Police Department Urges Local Residents to Stay Off Their Phones
MOSO IMAGE / Shutterstock.com
Asking residents to curtail mobile phone use is fine, so long as you’re willing to follow suit.
We’ve nearly all been at a large public gathering or a professional sporting event where essentially everyone is trying to use their mobile phones, collectively creating a telecommunications dead zone.
That was the case at Seattle’s annual Seafair Torchlight Parade last year, hindering some calls to the city’s 911 emergency call center.
Trying to be proactive before last Saturday’s parade, the Seattle Police Department asked residents via its online blotter to not overburden cellular networks and limit phone calls and social media activity.
Then they did this:
Chief O'Toole and the Neighborhood Response Team pose for a selfie. #torchlight pic.twitter.com/X4Ja98L6Z4
— Seattle Police Dept. (@SeattlePD) July 26, 2015
When called out on Twitter, the account got a bit sassy:
Just asked you to stop with the Facebook event reminders is all. We get it. You're having a poetry reading.
Apparently poetry readings are alive and well in the Emerald City.
Aside from that, the incident provides a nice illustration of how local, public communications teams can set their own example.
“You make a good point,” Seattle police spokesman Sgt. Sean Whitcomb texted The Seattle Times just after the second tweet. “Thanks for the reminder!”
Nationally, the Federal Communications Commission is wrestling with the emergency response system’s shift from local to Internet networks, where 911 outages are no longer isolated to cities like Seattle but can affect customers across multiple states.
Regulators fined T-Mobile $17.5 million for an emergency call malfunction that left about 50 million people unable to call 911 for three hours in August.
The FCC recently approved rules encouraging telecom companies to share information about outages and ideas for making the 911 call system more robust, like adding text capabilities.
“A single 911 call today can involve several companies operating in different locations across the country, and that means a single failure in one location can leave people without 911 service across multiple states, indeed across the nation,” FCC Head of Public Safety David Simpson said in a July speech, The Wall Street Journal reported.
So Seattle police were right to have a contingency plan in place, in case their 911 Call Center went down at Torchlight, advising attendees to locate “public safety personnel working along the parade route and ask for assistance,” as well as to promote mobility in moderation.
(Image by MOSO IMAGE / Shutterstock.com)
Dave Nyczepir is News Editor at Government Executive’s Route Fifty.
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