The entire country has been plagued with outages to our 911 systems in recent months. At least eight states, including Texas, have dealt with outages as of late. The million-dollar question is, why are these outages happening?
Doug Griffith with the Houston Police Officers Union told KTRH, "A lot of agencies don't have the money to upgrade the computer systems that they have. And therefore, they get overworked, and they start to crash over time."
Griffith says these outages then make the job much harder for dispatchers because the dispatchers have to collect all the necessary data to dispatch first responders manually. He said, "We have to be cautious, and plan ahead, and make sure that we have the infrastructure set up to protect our 911 system, and make sure our officers and firefighters get to where they need to be."
Griffith says this is why police agencies need to make sure they have good cybersecurity systems in place, as well as a backup plan for if and when outages do happen.