AI helps dispatch centers do more with less, El Paso official says
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Facing staffing shortages and budget cuts, public safety agencies across the nation are turning to AI for a helping hand to field 911 calls.
Emergency crisis centers are facing a workplace crisis of their own. Burnout, high turnover rates and absenteeism continue to strain dispatch staff, with almost 70% of public safety professionals saying they face pre-shift stress in their work, according to a recent survey. To combat understaffed teams and unrelenting 911 calls, U.S. municipalities are tapping AI as a force multiplier.
In Texas, the El Paso County 911 District is working with IT solutions provider Presidio to modernize its emergency response system and infrastructure, which more than 40 agencies in the county rely on, said Scott Calderwood, the executive director of El Paso County 911 District.
The authority has already started leveraging artificial intelligence to transcribe calls and generate translations for non-English speaking callers, which helps staff respond more efficiently to callers’ needs by reducing confusion or errors, Calderwood said.
Now, county officials are eager to explore what else AI can do to help enhance and streamline 911 call center operations. An AI bot trained to answer and summarize nonemergency calls, for instance, will go live next month with the El Paso County 911 District, he said.
The technology is not just a shiny addition to public safety operations, Calderwood said. The AI aims to help reduce the amount of nonemergency calls to human dispatchers, which is a major priority for the district.
“In the 911 world, our most critical metric is call-answer time,” he said. “I want to cut down on the time it takes for somebody to call [911] and the time it takes for us to send a resource. If we can impact that metric, then [artificial intelligence] is amazing.”
For instance, “there are some aspects in our call environment, especially in report taking, where you could spend 15 or 20 minutes on the phone taking a nonemergency report,” according to Calderwood.
“AI now has the ability to take that [call], turn it into a report and upload it right into a document,” he explained. “Our vision right now is a human’s going to look at that summary and … get the right resources allocated to this problem. What used to take them 15 or 20 minutes, they’re going to be accomplishing in less than five.”
With more efficient call responses, Calderwood said government agencies could see cost savings in return, which is critical at a time when public safety institutions across the U.S. are bracing for budget cuts.
In addition to El Paso, cities are increasingly turning to AI as a force multiplier for managing 911 calls. Baltimore, for instance, announced plans earlier this year to adopt an AI platform that will help automatically reroute nonemergency calls and offer call transcription and translation services.
In Virginia, AI-assisted calls have helped Arlington County’s Emergency Command Center manage nonemergency calls since last year. Officials said the technology, which uses a voice agent to interact with callers, has helped reduce the number of nonemergency calls to the emergency line by an average of 5,250 calls per month in the first quarter of 2025, compared to the previous year.
In Port Angeles, Washington, the PenCom Center has turned to an AI voice system that prioritizes answering nonemergency calls to ensure more serious inquiries are directed to human dispatchers. The model is trained to recognize key words, such as crime, or a caller’s voice inflection that may indicate that they are in danger, in which case the call is directed to a person.
“I see a world in a couple of years where AI is more prevalent in [the 911] industry … where it’s helping triage calls to make sure that we get to the critical calls quicker,” Calderwood said. “That's a huge service, and we're going to be able to do that with less people, and we're going to be able to do it faster and more accurately."