Social Media Changing Our Relationship With Emergency Services

It has been more than 70 years since the first emergency telephone line was launched in London, and 999 is the number we all learn from a young age for police, fire, and ambulance in the UK.

Click here to view Figure 1.

But in a world where a telephone call is just one of many different ways we communicate with one another, could things be about to change?

Many local forces are already using social media (Twitter and Facebook in particular) in some rather creative ways. The West Midlands Police recently hosted a 24-hour tweetathon to expose time-wasting 999 calls. I first heard about this approach being used by the Greater Manchester Police back in 2010.

Departments have recognised that these sites can be powerful communication channels for sharing important information with the local community. But emergency services are also beginning to look seriously at how people are using their smartphones and other mobile devices and whether they can be used by the public to notify command and control centres about emergency situations.

People of my generation might be a little cynical about the prospect of using Twitter if our house is burning down. However, as the Deputy Commissioner of the London Fire Brigade, Rita Dexter, argued late last year when it announced plans to set up the world’s first 999 emergency Twitter feed:

When it was first set up in 1935, people said that dialling 999 to report emergencies would never work. Today BT handles over 30 million emergency calls each year. It’s time to look at new ways for people to report emergencies quickly and efficiently and social media could provide the answer in the future.

Txt “HELP” to 911
The US was behind the UK in the introduction of an emergency telephone number (911 was introduced in 1968), but it has been quick to recognise that voice calls are no longer the only way to raise the alert in an emergency.

The Federal Communications Commission announced plans for a Text-to-911 service in December 2012. The service will ultimately enable US citizens to send an SMS in situations where a voice call could endanger the caller, or when a person with disabilities cannot make a voice call.

Perhaps Twitter isn’t the ideal medium through which to report a life-or-death situation, but its potential power for two-way information sharing with the emergency services could have hugely valuable implications.

Take the awful helicopter crash in the Vauxhall area of London in January. There were eyewitness accounts, video footage, and photos (taken by people on their commute to work) all over social media. This information could prove vital in the post-incident investigation, and a well-publicised Twitter address with an associated hashtag — perhaps @999 or #londonheli in this instance — would provide a fast (possibly real-time) and efficient way for the public to share information with the emergency services.

The latest incident management systems used by many command and control centres can already accommodate this influx of information. Incident files can be appended with information from traditional sources such as telephone calls, CCTV footage, and social media posts to create a complete timeline of events. (Photos and videos from mobile devices are often time and location stamped.) This timeline enables investigators to piece together and reconstruct the incident quickly to reveal what happened, when, and why. With all emergency incidents, the faster you can act, the better the response and resolution.

I am keen to find out what approach the London Fire Bridge will take, but I give the last word to Rita Dexter: “With over a billion people now using Facebook and half a billion using Twitter, it’s quite clear that social media is here to stay.”