In this episode of Hexagon’s Public Safety Speaks vodcast series, experts discuss the future of 911.
Watch as Hexagon’s Chris Carver talks with Pitkin County Operations Manager Brad Flanagan and 911inform Vice President, Public Safety Mark Fletcher about new technology, expectations of the public and what agencies should be doing now to prepare for the future.
Watch the vodcast or read the transcript below.
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Transcript
Chris Carver:
Hello everyone and welcome to this edition of Public Safety Speaks from Hexagon. This time our topic, well, it’s a broad one, but it’s the future of 911. So, it’s one of the most important topics that public safety faces today. Thankfully, we have two folks here today to talk about this topic with us, that are experts in the field. Mark Fletcher, a longtime 911 expert, who’s joining us today for 911inform, and Brad Flanagan, who helps lead NENA’s 911 future working group as they work to address some of these challenges as well.
So today we’re going to kind of talk through some of them, have hopefully a spirited conversation, no doubt that’s going to happen, having spent some quality time with both these gentlemen, and hopefully provide some insight and information that’ll help you no matter what your role in public safety, whether it’s 911, whether it’s law enforcement, fire or EMS, or whether you’re a stakeholder or a community leader. No matter what your role, the future of 911 matters to you and it certainly matters to those who’ve gathered here today to talk about this important topic.
So I’ll start out with Brad, as you look at 911 as someone who works in the public safety space today, the future of it, what does that mean to you?
Brad Flanagan:
Well, Chris, the future is so broad and it could mean so many different things. For me personally, the future of 911 is going to be solving the challenges that the industry has come to find are indicative of who we are as an industry. We have historical problems hiring, retaining and getting the help that we need to people as quickly as we can. And the next several years is going to be building those new ways of doing things that are going to change everything. All these companies and partners are doing great things and they’re building all of these great technologies. Now it’s time for the comms centers themselves to really start adopting and finding the solutions and working with them.
And that’s the next five to 10 for me, is going to be looking at how can I help develop work, find ways to try a lot of these technologies, so that we can report back to these small comms center managers that can benefit the most from these things. And for me, I see a lot of growth into the satellite tech area, there’s a lot of interest that’s going to be happening in, not only cybersecurity, but into quantum security, that’s going to be a big topic in the next five to 10. And really the automatic call processing, artificial intelligence and machine learning in a real-time live environment, rather than doing it in post or in analytics, that it’s going to be a forefront to either assist or work with dispatchers to provide better service to our citizens.
Chris Carver:
Very good. Thank you, Brad. And you touched on something I think is really important. And Mark, this is something you’ve worked on for decades really, is technology is just not technology being implemented for technology’s sake. It’s not just building the flying car because it looks really cool, but in the public safety world, it’s about deploying technology that actually solves the challenges, at least in partnership with the people and the policy and the procedure. It’s about really solving those challenges. So would you agree with that, Mark, that we really have an opportunity through technology to solve challenges?
Mark Fletcher:
Yeah, we do, Chris, and thanks for having me on today, I appreciate this. The problem that’s out there is that the consumer, the general public, they’re consuming technology at an incredibly fast rate. Public safety has always been tried and true, they’re resistant to change, they like what works because let’s face it, they’ve got people’s lives in their hands. And you’ve got two different velocities in what’s happening here. So you’ve got this high-speed velocity that’s being consumed by the public, and you’ve got to balance that on the public safety side by not going too fast that we’re driving off the edge of the curve here. So that becomes a very fine balance because the public starts to expect the same capabilities in public safety, that they can experience with their family and friends, and that’s the challenge.
Chris Carver:
Right. And I would say, and I want to get both your takes on this, the implementation and the evolution of technology also depends on the organization that we’re talking about, too, because some agencies want to live at the bleeding edge and other agencies are not quite so quick to embrace new technology. Brad, do you see that as you interact with agencies through your working in the NENA working groups?
Brad Flanagan:
Oh yeah, I mean, that’s indicative of even… my agency is very small. So when we go, I have 16 FTEs, I have eight seats, I’m doing satellites and a bunch of other stuff. And we are tip of the spear in technology because we work on so many different things, but we’re able to zig and zag really quickly. So if we try something and it doesn’t work, we can come back and start back at fresh because we take 100,000 calls a year, which isn’t a huge amount, where a Denver 911 or LA or Seattle, that’s going to be a much bigger shift and there’s much bigger infrastructure that has to be considered at the same time. So that’s where the technology, I think Fletch made a great point in that it’s scary that you have to start changing and we have to start growing, but where do you do that and how do you do that and what’s going to be the safest way to do that? Especially with the ideology of the five nines that most centers live and breathe and die under.
Chris Carver:
Right. No, absolutely. What do you think we could do, and I’ll go back to Fletch for this and I’ll come back to you, Brad, what can we do to help agencies get ready for this transition? What can we do to help agencies figure out how to change better, if you will, and manage that?
Mark Fletcher:
Well, I think it’s the role of the manufacturer to introduce the new technologies and take advantage of situations like the various shows in the industry, the various forums, the technology groups. They need to start seeding the information into public safety and getting feedback on what public safety requirements are, to consume that technology at an acceptable velocity. Manufacturers of technology don’t always understand the impact of that technology on the public safety mission. So again, it’s this fine balancing act of three or four different axes that need to be vetted out. And the smaller agencies, I like what Brad says, a smaller agency can duck and turn and jive and move quickly, and if something’s not working, they can very quickly back out and not impact over a long term.
People always look to, well, what is LA doing? What is Chicago doing? What is New York City doing? Those are the last places you want to roll out technology that’s not tried and true, because you’re going to impact a lot of people all at once. It’s really the role of the smaller agency to be that incubator, to try things at a calmer scale that’s manageable.
Chris Carver:
Right, right. No, that’s a good point. Would you agree with that, Brad?
Brad Flanagan:
Oh, 100%. I mean, really that’s a lot of what my agency does. That’s my belief scale. That’s what we’re doing through the committees I work on, is we’re trying to find and use and test and then report back, that whole function of the future think committee is to research and report. It’s what’s going to be happening. Let’s talk about voice to text on audio, let’s talk about voice to text from radio into the center. How can it be used? How can it be manipulated? How can it make the job of a dispatcher easier? And we then report that to all of these agencies that are like, “Hey, that might solve a specific problem that I have.” And a lot of the tech companies that I work with or talk to, they have these guys that are so brilliant, that can do so many things and they just say, “We just don’t know what you want.” Because we can develop anything, but if it’s not going to be practical or useful, nobody’s going to use it.
And so that’s a lot of where identification of what the challenges are that we’re trying to solve, and that’s the biggest place that you start from is, look, we’re having a retention problem because we can’t hire anybody because the typing test is too hard for everybody. So why don’t we get rid of keyboards? What can we do to get rid of keyboards? Well, let’s start working on voice to text. And that’s how I’ve started getting into all this technology stuff, is I have real world problems that are better solved with technology than with administrative changes.
Chris Carver:
No, and I think you hit the nail on the head. I mean, although I will confess, I still have an allergic reaction when you say getting rid of keyboards, that’s just a bridge I can’t cross. But I think it’s indicative of the real-world application. If the problem exists, how can tech solve it? Whether that’s, and I’m going to lead back to Mark here in just a minute, 911 calls in hotels, Mark, you were heavily involved in passing the legislation regulation around ensuring that that problem was solved. And I think maybe inside that lives also some insight about how to move forward 911 public safety and technology together. Do you think that experience you had with that effort and that initiative might offer some insights today?
Mark Fletcher:
Well, yeah. I mean, it told me that I didn’t pay attention to PBS when I was a kid, and I’m just a bill, because I learned a lot about how legislation works. And what really was kind of disappointing to that was how much we had to dumb down that legislation and make it simple language to get it through. So the problem exists across the industry that a lot of people that are in decision-making roles really don’t understand the technology, and that’s a problem. I think we need to expand that use case a little bit deeper into our legislature, so they understand the technology that they’re legislating and the impact of that technology or lack of impact.
Chris Carver:
Right, right. And then the nature of how public safety is governed and where those regulations live, being that it lives in multiple places and it adds to that confusion. Brad, in your experience in Colorado, how have you found that to be when you’re working with your legislatures and informing them on what they need to do to move 911 forward?
Brad Flanagan:
Especially in a home rural state, it becomes very, very challenging for even local administrators to really wrap their head around what we do as a 911 industry. Everybody understands we get cops there, we get firefighters there. But then talking even to local representatives, it’s very important to take the time to clearly articulate not only what we do, but how we do it and the challenges involved in that. And from city management, county management, all the way through to your state representatives. Our state representatives in Colorado are very forward-thinking, and we’ve been very fortunate to be able to work with them on a couple of different bills. But Mark’s absolutely right, you have to be able to say, when a cell phone calls, it does this, and this is why we’re having a hard time in mountainous Aspen, it’s really hard to find the right location because we don’t have cell service. So what else can we do to make it better?
Chris Carver:
No, absolutely. So in terms of deploying new technology, what advice do you have to agencies about pitfalls they can avoid, things they can do to make sure that their projects are successful? What would be some key insights that you’ve learned in that process? Mark, I’ll start with you.
Mark Fletcher:
I mean, again, it’s an education, knowledge and awareness problem. So agencies need to take the time or give their employees time to digest, educate themselves and understand what technology is available. And that goes right on down to allowing people to get their ENP certification, get their CMCP certification, attend conferences, attend workshops, understand this industry because it is expanding at incredible rate and oh, we’ll let you go to a conference every other year. Okay, so you’re going to always be two years behind? That’s just one example right there.
Chris Carver:
Yep. What would you say about that, Brad?
Brad Flanagan:
Well, yeah, I mean, one, being informed, being knowledgeable about what’s happening around you. Two, the most important thing for me is the willingness. Be willing to accept that something can be better than it’s always been. It’s that ability to say, we have a problem that we might be able to solve in a new way and be willing to be flexible as you’re going through it. Now, I’m not a fan of throwing money at problems, I don’t believe in buying something without trying it, I don’t believe in, a box solution isn’t always the best solution. There might be things that you can do that are almost free. One of the things that we were struggling with is we needed voice to text on our radios for our fire departments because we had a dispatcher, we only have two people working at a time, so one dispatcher had law in their ear and they had a speaker in front of them for fire. Well, if law was talking when fire responded, they couldn’t hear it, so we needed to get voice to text.
And so we figured out a way to get that straight from an arbitration module into our CAD console and just using Microsoft Enable to use voice to text. Was it perfect? No, it wasn’t, but it was a first iteration and it gave us something that said this might be a thing. And being willing to try, being willing to do something different is the biggest challenge that I think most agencies run into, is that it’s like, oh, we can’t do that. If it’s not perfect, it’s not ready, we can’t do it. And we look at it as if I get some text, then that might be better than none, and let’s try it and let’s figure out how to make it better and let’s work on improvement and collaborating with organizations. I love collaboration.
If one of the tech companies wants to try something, it’s like, yeah, let’s try it, let’s see what it does. Let’s play. Because if we can find a solution out of this or even just find something that we know it isn’t going to work, then that’s just a little bit more knowledge that we have that we can then tell everybody else about it.
Chris Carver:
Yeah, no, absolutely.
Mark Fletcher:
And I’ll just add on to what Brad said. We’re living in 2023 right now, technology is all over the place. If something doesn’t exist that you need to get your job done, it’s not because the technology doesn’t exist yet in most cases, it’s because no one came up with the use case to say, “I need this technology to solve this problem for me.” And if you echo what your problem is, oh yeah, I got something that’ll do that. Is it perfect? No, but you know what, I could probably tweak it to be perfect.
Chris Carver:
Yeah, no, absolutely.
Brad Flanagan:
And if you beta with somebody else, those beta programs and playing with companies and working with them, one, it gives you a voice, two, it helps you solve the problem and three, you might be able to get it for almost nothing. I mean, that is the key of being willing to try, gives you so many benefits in your agency. And one of the things that we found with us is that it helped us retain employees because our employees are excited, they get to do something different, they get to try something new, they might save a life in a totally new way and start a trend across the country, and they’re very excited about that.
Chris Carver:
So all that is great. All that’s wonderful. I’m going to get out my cold-water bucket for just a minute. How do we ensure that we do not, and the phrase I heard at California NENA this week that I thought was wonderful, and I apologize, I forgot who I heard say it first, how do we ensure though that agencies and their personnel are not buried under a data technology tsunami, with a bunch of disparate things all coming in and rendering them unable to do their job?
Brad Flanagan:
I love that term. That is a great term for it. I call it the internet of things, the peripheries that are killing us. And that’s where we’re at right now, is we have so many different peripheries, but they are starting to consolidate, they are starting to work in tandem. But it’s that understanding that in five years, we’re going to be hiring today’s eighth graders. Those eighth graders can play video games that have 35 different applications that are doing 18 things at the same time, having peripheries isn’t going to kill the next generation of dispatchers, but we have to be cognizant and create those avenues to make those user interfaces easy enough to use. And single sign-ons, that’s a simple solution: One sign-on, you get everything you got, and then you don’t have to go through 37 passwords.
And if the dispatchers know how to use the systems and are comfortable with them, and you policy them in a way that it’s not a liability that they’re not using it, or if they do use it, if you nuance it, it becomes cumbersome and scary for them, but you prep them for it and you just take hurdles out of the way as you find them. Personally, I have 35 sign-ons, but if I can get my biometrics going and I thumb in and I do my two FA and it logs everything in and gets everything going all at once, well that’s not a burden for me now. Now I just know that I can use these different tools in different ways to solve different problems.
Chris Carver:
Mark, how about you?
Mark Fletcher:
Another thing, what people forget all the time with all this technology, there are two buttons that solve the bulk of the problems. One is the volume switch and the other is an on-off switch. When you go to a restaurant and you get the three-page menu, you don’t order everything to decide what you want to eat. It’s a menu of here’s what your choices are. And the same thing comes down to a good GUI interface – or user interface. Here’s what I have available, this is what I want to take care of my task the way I want to deal with it right now under these circumstances, that I’m using this computer to make the decision with. And if I want more information, I can bring in additional resources if I want them and they’re there for me. So you don’t have to consume everything because yeah, it is a tsunami, you don’t want everything all at once, but you want to know that it’s there so that if you think it’s useful, it’s easily accessible to you. And to me, that’s the start of simplifying a good graphic user interface.
Brad Flanagan:
Absolutely.
Chris Carver:
Yeah. So it sounds like on the GUI side, that would be one of the issues out there that you would like to see vendors work on. What are maybe one of the-
Brad Flanagan:
Oh, yeah. Well, and that is happening today. I mean, very, really a lot of the stuff that we’re doing is if we are talking to a vendor and we have a technology that we really like, we will actually reach out and say, “We want it to interface with this. Is that possible? How can you do that?” And we talk about that GUI. If we get a good user interface that has five of our pieces in the same place, that’s a win. So how do you – as large agencies, as anybody that’s in public safety, when you’re buying technology, make that one of your requirements that it has to interface with something else. It has to be part of your GUI that you already use, if they’re going to be awarded that RFP or whatever.
Chris Carver:
Oh, no, that’s a good point. And really then that helps, the last one of these, the last of this series we did was about staffing crisis in 911, and ideally, if the technology is working correctly, would you say that it also helps us alleviate at least a little bit of the staffing crisis? Because we can take really time intensive things like for example, mutual aid, having to call the neighboring department to borrow a medic unit for a heart attack call when in fact that could be accomplished through some sort of a CAD-to-CAD interface. Do you see this kind of advancing in that way and potentially helping to address the staffing challenges?
Mark Fletcher:
Absolutely.
Brad Flanagan:
Yeah, I mean, very, really the more things you can automate and the more things you can make work with a dispatcher, the easier their job’s going to be. But I mean, at the end of the day, dispatchers and 911, and I mean, across the country, as we’ve seen during the great recession, the technologies are not the problem. It’s the archaic systems of management and administration and everything else that may be a little bit alleviated if their people are able to do their job easier. If you can hire a broader breadth of people because the job isn’t so cumbersome, we’ve created this community of cumbersomeness that’s so heavy to lift sometimes that it’s almost impossible for a dispatcher to do their job on a day-to-day basis.
Chris Carver:
Fair point. Mark, how about you?
Mark Fletcher:
Well, yeah. So one of my favorite use cases that I always refer back to, let’s take a 2022 Chevy Tahoe, going down the highway, 75 miles an hour, goes into the median, overturns multiple times, high delta V, crush zones on the driver dashboard activated. What do we know from that? Okay, I’ve got a serious motor vehicle accident, I’m probably going to need heavy rescue. I know I’ve got lower leg trauma. What are the bed counts in my local trauma hospitals? Who’s got a helicopter available? And let’s get all these resources. Instead of 911, what’s your emergency? How about here’s your emergency, here’s your deployment package, approve this and this is what I’m going to automatically dispatch. Not only have you made that happen faster, you’ve also reduced the thinking that’s got to happen here based on preset protocols.
So you’ve sped up the system, you’ve gotten the appropriate resources, you’ve even got the destination hospital picked because you know need not only a hospital that’s a trauma center, one that’s got an OR that’s available and an orthopedic doc on staff ready to go. All of that can be made automatically.
Chris Carver:
So one of the things that I’ve said many times in discussions with folks, is that in five to seven years, the last way we will find out about many emergencies is through a voice phone call. Would you both agree with that, or would you find fault with that or do you think I’m headed in the right direction? Brad-
Mark Fletcher:
I don’t think it’s going to be that long.
Chris Carver:
Okay, so I’m too late. Okay, Brad, how about you?
Brad Flanagan:
Yeah, no, I believe that the fact that we’ve only done voice communication for so long is not indicative of what our society’s doing. I mean, that’s not the way anybody communicates with anybody. And with the real-time crime centers and with all of the data that’s going on all the time around you, we should know about things before we get notification from a citizen involved.
Chris Carver:
Right. No, that’s a good point.
Mark Fletcher:
Let me give you another example, Chris, that’s MLTS and enterprise communications related. You get a 911 hangup phone call, that happens all the time and everybody’s got their procedures, call back, dispatch, do whatever. But what if you get a hangup 911 phone call or several of them, and then you get an intelligent, smart building generating an emergency event package that says, “Hey, you know what? I got smoke detectors going off in this area of the building that you just got hang up 911 calls from, and I’ve got a room here with a temperature of 180 degrees and my CO2 signature shows that there’s 20 people there. Gee, I wonder what’s going on?”
Chris Carver:
Right. And that actually, so not only does technology, I would say, offer the opportunity to reduce the workload in some ways on 911 professionals. Mark, to your example, both for the fire example and for the auto accident example, it offers us really to be dynamically more effective as a public safety world. I mean, we’re able to do a lot of things today, but just bringing them together into that one package, I think you’re absolutely right, allows us to make a lot better decisions. I mean, there’s a very famous incident from Texas, probably over 30 years ago now, where it was a traumatic rescue, there were multiple victims trapped. It took a long time to get them all extricated, and some people didn’t survive. In the initial call, they had information that this was going on, that it was a technical rescue situation, but for a variety of reasons, namely policy and procedure, they only sent one engine company and an ambulance and then later, a battalion chief. So the arrival of all those specialized resources was somewhat delayed.
So to that end, even now we have the technology, but what do you say about the need to update the policies, the procedures and the best practices to match the capability of the technology to get better results? Brad, as an ops manager, where do you see that headed?
Brad Flanagan:
Well, especially the policies and procedures I think are secondary to getting the right tech. Once you start doing something, if you’re going to policy it out right at the beginning, the problem that you run into is you’re boxing yourself in and you don’t know how it’s going to turn out. And so then you end up with this change fatigue with your staff, because every time you’re updating all of these policies. What we like to do is we like to do a very broad policy when we introduce something. When we introduced voice to text or I’m sorry, when we introduced video to the center, we brought it in as this is an optional resource, this has the ability to help us and this is what it does. And that was the whole policy. And then as we learned about it, we were able to shorten that and build it in.
But that willingness to allow things into the center and to try it and to play with it while you have a protection for your dispatchers, I think is a good first step. And then you create your policy as you learn about what’s better for these pieces.
Chris Carver:
Do you think there, and this question for both you and Mark, and this is just something that came to me while you were all talking, do you think there might be a possibility here where the 911 community and vendors could collaborate together? We have ICE, the inner-city collaboration events from NENA, we have tech forums from APCO, there’s a variety of efforts in this way. But what if we had sort of a stand-up prototype 911 center that had the capability to deploy and interact with these different technologies, so that we could get a taste of it in the beginning and not really have to rely on agencies to beta things live in the 911 world? What would you think about perhaps as part of the future 911 effort, creating some sort of tool like that?
Brad Flanagan:
Testing’s huge and playing and trying, and the California lab is a huge place like that. Motorola has a great lab that does a lot of these things as well. It’s just the willingness to play and try and if agencies are starting to open up their willingness, the whole idea of future tech can change completely.
Chris Carver:
Oh, absolutely.
Mark Fletcher:
There’s an event, IWCE in Las Vegas that’s coming up, and I don’t know if this is public, public knowledge, it’s not secret, but one of the initiatives there is going to be the PSAP of the future, where vendors are getting together and they’re setting up an environment that demonstrates all of the technology and all of the interoperability between the differing technologies, where people can go in and everyone’s going to listen to the use cases that come out of that to help build and improve their product. So it’s encouraging to see that kind of industry collaboration happening at the vendor level, instead of being closed together and hiding, no, this is what we’re doing, here’s how we can work together and let’s go to where industry is showing up so we can actually model these use cases. And hey, gee, let me know what people think about this. Do we have this right or am I off in La, la land here with something that doesn’t make sense, like self dispatch or an application to call 911. How many times did we have to go through that before the vendor community, like, that doesn’t work.
Chris Carver:
Right. But I think you get us right to a really great closing thing to talk about, which is even more than ever before, would you say that collaboration is key to the future of 911, whether we’re talking about the technology, the operations or the human factors?
Mark Fletcher:
Absolutely. No doubt about it.
Brad Flanagan:
Oh yeah. I mean, even just the collaboration between sister agencies. 15 years ago, getting information from your PSAPs next door was challenging. We had challenges working with our side-by-side comms centers, and that wasn’t even just the collaboration with the technology, that was just people working together. And that is starting to be gapped. There’s over the top solutions, there’s CAD to CADs, there’s radio solutions, there’s phone … there’s all these solutions that now people are starting to use. And on the vendor side, I mean, it’s amazing the amount of collaboration that’s happening. And it’s just like Fletch and I were talking about with that GUI, the GUIs are starting to happen.
Those collaborations are required because some companies have a really great product that does one thing and another company has a really great product that does one thing, and if they can start combining these into these great suites of products that do a host of solutions. If you’re working on trying to improve your dispatch times for your fire apparatus, well, there’s this company that does this, this company that does that. But overall, if you can implement all three of them, maybe you can increase those times significantly. And that’s where, I think, companies and comms centers are realizing we can really leverage a lot of this to make better things out of disparate products.
Mark Fletcher:
Industry collaboration goes, and the problem with the lack of it goes back forever. When I first started dispatching back in 1980, no paramedics existed in New Jersey. They started a paramedic program in the early ’80s. When my local BLS volunteer squad found out that paid paramedics were coming into town. Dude, it cut off five minutes on their response time because they thought their job was under the gun. How ridiculous is that?
Chris Carver:
Thank you for that reminder Fletch, that it’s always been a system of us adapting what we do presently to the potential impacts and the real impacts of technology and change as it comes out. So one last question for this as we wrap things up, and I do want to say thank you both again for spending time here, talking with us today. Fortunately, you mentioned IWCE, for those of you that will be there, I’ll be pleased to be part of a panel there talking about sharing CAD data and information. So for any of those of you who are at that event, I hope to see you, stop by and say hello, please.
But one thing I know given the nature, and it’s just like your BLS ambulance personnel in New Jersey, future can be scary, change can be scary. To those folks that are watching this today that would say, “Oh my God, the sky’s falling. We have personnel challenges, funding challenges, technology challenges. It’s nothing but difficulty going forward.” Would you say you’re hopeful about the future and how would you express that hopefulness to those who might not be quite so hopeful? Mark, I’ll start with you and then Brad, I’ll let you have the last word.
Mark Fletcher:
I would hope people are just going to wake up and understand that it’s about the whole, it’s about solving the problem. And the problem is migrating and changing, the toolbox is getting bigger, the tools in the toolbox are expanding. And if you’re not ready to expand the toolbox with a new set of capabilities, you might, this is harsh, but you might want to start thinking about a new career because this is people’s lives. That’s all I really have to say about it.
Chris Carver:
Thank you, Fletch. Brad?
Brad Flanagan:
Yeah, that’s a great example and that’s a great point. For me, a year ago or two years ago when COVID hit, everything changed for a lot of people. There was a lot of fear. The great resignation happened. I was down to 25% staffing. And by adopting technologies and by working on things and by changing methods of the way we’ve always done it, we came out of it that we’re almost completely fully staffed now, we haven’t lost a single employee in almost a year at this point, which is unheard of, for our agency at least.
And I’m extremely optimistic because of the things that we’re able to do, we can start really utilizing the most important part of what a dispatcher can do, and that is empathize, and that is think on their feet. All the mundane tasks and the route things that they have to do over and over again that just take up their time and their effort, we’re trying to get rid of so they can empathize and they can think on their feet and solve these problems. And I’m very excited to see when they get to do that, Minority Report style.
Chris Carver:
Oh, excellent. Thank you Brad, and thank you Fletch for joining us here today on Public Safety Speaks. It’s been a great conversation. I too share the enthusiasm about what we can do in the future, especially as vendors like Hexagon and public safety agencies, like our many partners all around the United States and the world, come together and address these issues and create a better future for those who work in 911 and those who depend on 911. So thank you all very much. Stay safe. Have a great rest of your week and a great weekend, and I look forward to seeing you all again on our next episode of Public Safety Speaks, at a conference where Hexagon’s attending, on a webinar or into the other formats where we try to connect with and learn from and share information with the public safety community on whom we depend so much. Thank you all very much. Have a great rest of your week. Bye-bye.
Mark Fletcher:
Thanks, Chris. Thanks, Brad.
Brad Flanagan:
Thanks. Have a good one.
