After years of delays, Oakland updates decades-old 911 dispatch technology – NBC Bay Area

On Thursday, Oakland leaders announced successful hardware and software upgrades to decades-old 911 technology. As a result, Oakland residents should have a more reliable emergency call system, and 911 response times should ultimately improve, they said.

The move follows a series of reports from NBC Bay Area’s research division showing that Oakland police have the worst response time to emergency calls of all 440 911 centers in California.

As for Thursday, Oakland PD answered 51% of 911 calls within the state standard of 15 seconds. Oakland should be at 90%, according to the state.

NBC Bay Area analyzed state data showing that the average response time by Oakland police to a 911 call in June 2024 was 50 seconds. That’s still the longest time in California. Fifty seconds is more than three times the state’s required time of 15 seconds.

The next longest is CHP Golden Gate’s communications center, which serves a larger area and has an average response time of 25.8 seconds. CHP Golden Gate has more than halved its response times since last year. According to the data, Oakland’s progress is significantly slower.

Mayor Sheng Thao, city IT Director Tony Batalla and 911 Manager Gina Cheng announced at the Oakland Police Department’s 911 dispatch center Thursday what they call the first major upgrade to Oakland’s computer-aided 911 dispatching system in more than 20 years.

But it has been fraught with delays. The Oakland City Council originally approved the $12.8 million upgrade in 2017, seven years ago.

Since then, the project has been beset by problems, and was criticized in two Alameda County citizen grand jury reports. One of those reports said that if the city continues to delay the upgrades, it “risks catastrophic failure” and that the dispatcher “will be back to pen and pencil.” That happened last summer. Oakland blamed a power outage.

IT Director Batalla said the new system should ensure that such a 911 outage does not happen in the future.

“The infrastructure here in Oakland is running in a data center called Digital Realty Trust. That’s a commercial data center. It’s built to withstand all types of outages. It’s very secure, both digitally and physically. And that means we’ve made great strides toward deploying reliable, secure, resilient infrastructure,” Batalla said.