FCC To Allow Texting To 911

tekgoblin writes "The FCC is looking into allowing people to report incidents to 911 via SMS from their mobile phones. They are also considering mobile video to show the 911 service what is going on. The current 911 system handles around 230 million calls per year with most of the calls being from mobile phones. One situation influenced this move to allow texting to 911 was the Virginia Tech shooting. 'The technological limitations of 9-1-1 can have tragic, real-world consequences,' the release said. 'During the 2007 Virginia Tech campus shooting, students and witnesses desperately tried to send texts to 9-1-1 that local dispatchers never received. If these messages had gone through, first responders may have arrived on the scene faster with firsthand intelligence about the life-threatening situation that was unfolding.'"

Comments

We want smaller government. Not a nanny state.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

If only $something was possible we would have averted $tragedy is a very elastic standard. We can not use that statement alone to justify anything. OK, if people were able to get to the emergency responders via text message and show them their mobile camera we might have saved a few lives. But if we force every person in the USA to drive M1A1 Abrams battle tank for commuting we would save a few lives in auto collisions too. (But lot more pedestrian causalities but that is a different story.)

If people are saying, "hey texting is cheap, mobile video camera are ubiquitous, let us see if we can take advantage of this to improve the emergency response" it is a valid statement/claim. But dredging up some vague anecdotal evidence where such a thing might have helped should not be the basis for an argument.

The tragedy is vast majority of the public and most of the journalists go for the anecdotes and miss the forest for the trees.

BTW, all those people crying hoarse "We want smaller government, less taxes, we want the government off our backs" to jump in argue why this level of expectation from the government is a bad idea. If you do nothing to reduce the public expectation of the government services, you will never ever reduce spending. Starving the beast wont work. Deficits will not shrink.