Can dispatchers pinpoint a 911 caller's location? It's possible and depends on the dispatch center, your phone and more

Can dispatchers pinpoint the location of a 911 caller?

That's an issue that's come up following the death of Jolene Waldref, who called 911 from a busy Milwaukee intersection in January and died after a responding ambulance crew didn't see her at the location.

At a press conference about Waldref's death last month, a Milwaukee Fire official brushed off a reporter’s question about tracking 911 callers and locating them by their phone’s coordinates.

"There’s no cell phone tracking, GPS integrated into anything. That’s largely a fictional thing that you see on TV,” said Milwaukee Assistant Fire Chief Joshua Parish.

But that is not true.

Generally speaking, it is possible for dispatchers to pinpoint the location of a wireless 911 call in some cases, but it depends a lot on the capabilities of the dispatch center, on a 911 caller's cellphone and a host of other factors.

In Waldref's case, dispatchers appear to have had coordinates for the corner of the intersection where she was later found unconscious.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel spoke to several national experts for this story, including officials with the National Emergency Number Association and two consultants in the emergency services and public safety sphere: retired fire chief Michael Boucher and former chief dispatcher Tracy Eldridge.

What location data is available when you call 911 from a cellphone?

Dispatchers typically receive an estimated location, including latitude and longitude coordinates, for 911 callers, the experts said.

In fact, Federal Communications Commission rules say that four times out of five, cellphone carriers like AT&T and Verizon must provide 911 dispatch centers with an address or coordinates for a 911 caller that are accurate within 50 meters, or about half a football field.

That caller location information is automatically transmitted to dispatch centers when the 911 call comes in. It shows up on a 911 call taker's screen, sometimes plotted on a map. The caller's location is estimated using GPS satellites, cellphone tower triangulation or some other means, Eldridge said.

Often, the location is not exact. But the coordinates that a call taker receives can be close, within a few meters of a caller. They can also be wildly inaccurate, at times miles away from a caller's real location, said April Heinze, vice president and chief of 911 operations at the National Emergency Number Association.

That's because the 911 system was not originally built for cellphones. How accurate the location is or isn't depends on a number of factors, including the cellphone's carrier, the age of the cellphone, the caller's surrounding environment and more, the experts said.

Recent innovations like RapidSOS give more precise locations

With recent innovations, however, dispatchers can get even better, more precise location information.

The majority of dispatch centers in the country now use a software called RapidSOS that, under the right circumstances, can give dispatchers the exact location of a 911 caller, according to experts and a RapidSOS spokesperson.

"(That) supplemental location data oftentimes is more accurate than what comes through the 911 system today, especially where wireless devices are concerned," Heinze said.

The technology uses location sensors on the cellphone to provide a much more precise location than cellphone tower triangulation, Eldridge said. RapidSOS is even capable of tracking 911 callers by providing real-time location updates. So if the caller is in a moving car, the dispatcher can follow them.

The technology is not a panacea and does not work with many older phones or for 911 calls made through certain carriers, Eldridge said. But it can be lifesaving when it works and a 911 caller doesn't know where they are or isn't able to communicate their location.

The RapidSOS tool is free to 911 dispatch centers.

Milwaukee Fire Department officials have not answered questions, both in person and by email, about whether their call takers and dispatchers use RapidSOS. They also have not answered questions about the ways 911 caller location information is displayed on 911 operators' screens and how that information is relayed to ambulance crews.

In response to Waldref's death, a resolution passed by the Common Council last week urged the Milwaukee Fire Department to review, among other things, "available and future technologies" for locating 911 callers who are using cellphones.

At a council committee meeting Thursday, Fire Chief Aaron Lipski said officials were still in an “analysis phase” on that piece of the review. After the meeting, Lipski would not take questions from reporters and ignored questions asked of him as he walked off.

To complicate matters, the city police and fire departments are in the middle of merging their separate dispatch operations into one 911 dispatch center and are about to switch to a new dispatching software, the result of a yearslong and bumpy process.

Would better location information have made a difference for Waldref?

Waldref, a 49-year-old mother of two from South Milwaukee, died Jan. 15 after calling 911 and reporting she couldn’t breathe as she waited near a bus stop at the busy intersection of North 76th and West Congress streets in subzero temperatures.

A private ambulance with Curtis Ambulance was dispatched but its crew did not see her lying on the ground near the intersection’s northwest corner. The crew left the scene after driving through the intersection twice and not searching on foot. They did not know which corner of the intersection she was at, Curtis officials have said.

In Waldref's case, city dispatchers appear to have had her close, if not exact, location. Call logs from her 911 call include the latitude and longitude of her location — placing her at the northwest corner, where she was eventually found unconscious by a passing driver who spotted her.

Eldridge, the consultant and former chief dispatcher, said an intersection is "pretty specific" and that most dispatchers would consider that enough information for locating a caller.

Still, when training 911 operators, Eldridge stresses the importance of giving all pertinent location information to first responders to make it as easy as possible for them to find the caller.

"I try to train folks to give that additional information, like, 'The north side of the parking lot,' or if it was an intersection, ... 'Looks like the caller is on the Aldi's side,' " she said. "But right now that is not the standard of practice."

Specificity is even more important when a 911 caller is in a large building like a shopping mall or an expansive area, like a parking lot or a park, she said.

Lipski, the Milwaukee fire chief, told committee members Thursday that officials are exploring how the new dispatch software could lead to quicker and easier information sharing with private ambulance companies.

Some first responders in other cities have in-car computers outfitted with technology that shows them what 911 operators can see on their computers, including maps with 911 caller location.

Reporter Elliot Hughes contributed to this story.

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Can dispatchers pinpoint a 911 caller's location? It depends