Didn't we predict this?

We sure did. A couple of weeks ago, we mentioned that New York City's 911 and 311 call centers were being modified to receive cell phone pictures and videos, and we said:

We hope that Daley won't follow suit and try to bring "Sex, Lies, and Digital Video" to Chicago to appease citizens around election time.

Well...guess what.

An article in yesterday's Sun-Times discusses Alderman Edward Burke's desire to have the system modified to "allow callers to send cell-phone images and text messages to dispatchers from emergency scenes."

Text messages???? What are kids with cell phones going to send, "suk my dik bich"?

This is another example of big shots who know nothing about how things actually work, dictating what "should be done" with no grip on reality. Burke is also quoted as saying

"A private citizen could immediately transmit a photograph of a person fleeing the scene of an accident to the 911 center, which then could immediately transmit that photograph through the system to the Police Department. That kind of resource would be a great improvement...They could then transmit it to computers in the squad cars."

Oh, you mean the computers that only work half the time without this "new technology?" Did anyone stop to wonder exactly how we'd know exactly which accident at which location in this 200-plus-square-mile city these pictures are from? Or is that too realistic for people who have no clue about how Operations runs?

"Just think about live, real-time video of a crime in progress that could be transmitted to the 911 center. [Dispatchers could] immediately notify the police officers coming on the scene, 'Be careful. Behind the building on your left there's a gunman...The person who just fled is in a red Toyota.' That sort of thing."

Uh huh. The sort of thing you'd see in a movie. Hollywood fodder. In real life, under the best of circumstances, just how long would it take to record a, let's say, 15-second video of a "gunman behind the building on your left," type in a text message saying "There's a gunman behind the building on your left," send the video message, have it received and watched at the 911 Center by a calltaker, have it sent to the dispatcher, have the dispatcher watch it, and tell the officer in the field "There was a gunman behind the building on your left at least 3 minutes ago"?

And just maybe the citizen, who frequently calls 911 and says "I don't what he looks like, just send the police," will have the sense of awareness to include in this video/text message what the address is to the building that this gunman is hiding behind - or even what block in the city it's on.

Sounds like some cockamamie bullshit, doesn't it?

Kevin Smith, a spokesperson for OEMC whom we wouldn't recognize if he jumped out in front of us and yelled "BOO, I'm Kevin Smith," said there's a $10 million 911 center upgrade currently underway. For anyone reading this from the outside, PCOs know nothing of this upgrade. We're still looking at the same basic computer-aided dispatch screens that we were looking at when the building opened over 11 years ago. Our PSAPs still operate on Windows NT, which is from the early 1990s. Windows 2000 Professional still runs rampant in the building. And we, the "little people," have been told nothing about this upgrade that's "under way at the dispatcher level," according to the article.

We hope it's just some feel-good scheme thrown together haphazardly to get votes, and will go away when the practicality - or lack thereof - is realized.

We'll see.