If someone calls from the scene of an emergency, dispatchers at the Butler County 911 center can — with the permission of the caller — view a cellphone’s camera to get a visual of the fire, crash or any other emergency.

Advancements in technology, including the ability to view cellphone cameras, improved radio quality and the capability to text dispatchers, have helped local first responders do their work more efficiently.

“It can be something as simple as a complaint and someone wants to show a picture of what’s going on, or it can be a large fire and we want to be able to advise the units of how big the fire is,” Rob McLafferty, the county’s 911 coordinator and deputy director, said about how dispatchers can access a camera.

Dispatchers also can take text-to-911 calls, a relatively new development.

“We say, ‘Call if you can, but text if you can’t,’” McLafferty said.

The texting option can be helpful for people who are hearing impaired, or for people who are in a situation where they can’t talk — for example, a domestic violence situation.

The 911 center also has software that will allow instantaneous translation.

“If someone sends a message in Greek or Mandarin Chinese or anything, it will automatically translate to English,” McLafferty said.

Advancements also can be seen out in the field.

Conrad Pfeifer, a police officer with Middlesex Township, said that when he first started 18 years ago, police cars had no computers. Now, the cars are tied into the CAD, or computer aided dispatch, system.

Pfeifer said a call will come in on the radio and then come up on the computer in the form of a map. “We hit the map, and it will drive you to it,” he said. “It’ll tell you where all the vehicles are in the area. You can see every municipal department in the county that’s logged on.”

The computer helps in many ways, Pfeifer said. “I don’t have to talk to a dispatcher or jibber-jabber on the radio,” he said.

That can be a major asset during emergencies that require a massive response. Pfeifer referenced a school shooting in Georgia earlier this year where 50 police cars responded.

“Imagine all those guys talking on the radio,” he said. “I can just hit ‘en route’ and the computer puts me there instead of a dispatcher trying to take care of 50 different people.”

Caleb Forsythe, a police officer in Mars, said the radio system in his area is much improved.

“With the old system, you’d get nothing but static,” said Forsythe, who has a special interest in technology and is certified in several technology-related areas. “The 911 center couldn’t hear you, and you couldn’t hear them. Now that they changed the radio system, we can hear each other, which is nice.”

Another issue that once existed was the old fax system, which often would send distorted pictures of people the officers were looking for. Forsythe said the pictures would be so unclear that it was impossible for officers to identify the subject.

“Now with the mobile data terminal in your car, the pictures come up in color and they’re nice and clear, so you can see them,” he said.

Another technological asset in the field that improves officer safety is the ability to use a scanner to import information directly from a driver’s license into a citation generator.

“The whole citation is pre-populated,” Pfeifer said. “I don’t have to write with my head down. I hit the bar code, and I can see someone approaching the car. It’s a lot more safe.”

According to Steve Bicehouse, the county’s director of emergency services for the past 12½ years, the changes are relatively new.

“That’s all happened within the last couple years,” he said.

One of the major advances in technology reduced the number of selective routers to just two for the entire state — one of which is in Boyers and the other in Philadelphia. That has saved the taxpayers money, Bicehouse said, because the routers were expensive to maintain, and it’s also resulted in more accurate location information.

Butler’s 911 center, through a sharing of phone systems connected by the region’s Emergency Services internet, also has the ability to field calls even if the center itself is out of commission.

“If our 911 center had a fire or a tornado, our staff could go to another county and sign in and receive Butler County calls,” Bicehouse said. “It’s a seamless transition of service because if something happened at our 911 center, we could continue to operate.”

The same thing would apply to other counties as well. “If there was a tornado in Mercer County and they were inundated with 911 calls, we could take their overflow calls and process them the same way they do,” Bicehouse said.

For the final story in this series, watch in future editions of the Butler Eagle. The first part in this series was published Sunday, Dec. 1. Read it at butlereagle.com.

This article first appeared in the October edition of Butler County Business Matters.