Mayor Bloomberg Releases New Online End-to-end Emergency 911 Response Time Reporting System

December 30, 2013

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, Deputy Mayor for Operations Cas Holloway, Director of the Office of Citywide Emergency Communications Bruce Gaskey and Chief Analytics Officer Michael Flowers today unveiled the End-to-End 911 Response Time Reporting system, an online tool that publishes weekly response times to emergency 911 calls. The tracking of end-to-end response times became possible for the first time in city history due to the recent comprehensive overhaul of the City’s decades-old 911 system, and end-to-end response times were first published in the Mayor’s Management Report this year, tracking every segment of a 911 call from when the initial call is placed to the first arrival on scene. The new online tool – available here on www.nyc.gov – provides weekly end-to-end response time data, which presents a complete picture of a 911 call and will be continuously updated with additional weekly data. Previously, City government could only compute response times for individual agencies – meaning response times for FDNY or EMS emergencies only tracked the time starting from when the fire department received the call, transferred from a 911 operator, not from the moment the caller first called 911. This was the case since the 1970s, until earlier this year.

“The overhaul of the City’s decades-old 911 system has been a critical part of our efforts to modernize and improve emergency response operations,” said Mayor Bloomberg. “End-to-end response times provide insight into how much time each stage of the call process takes, and this new performance measurement will allow agencies to identify areas where overall response time can be reduced even further.”

“When Mayor Bloomberg took office, it was clear that the backbone and infrastructure of the 911 system was antiquated and rapidly deteriorating, and we could not accurately measure how long it took our first responders to help New Yorkers in need,” said Deputy Mayor Holloway. “Today we have a reliable, state-of-the-art 911 system and with the launch of this new tool, New Yorkers will know exactly how well we are doing.”

“Thanks to Mayor Bloomberg, Deputy Mayor Holloway, Office of Citywide Emergency Communications Director Gaskey and collaboration with the NYPD and FDNY, we now have an unprecedented level of insight into the most important transactions the City undertakes,” said Chief Analytics Officer Flowers.

First launched in 1968, New York City’s 911 system handles more than 11 million calls per year, making it the largest of its kind in the nation. The New York City Police Department and the Fire Department of New York City, along with the FDNY Emergency Medical Service operate the system. Coordination between the agencies is handled by the Office of Citywide Emergency Communications.

Due to the complex and varied nature of calls to the 911 system, the process of responding to those emergencies involves multiple different systems that work together to handle any type of incident that may occur. This new online tool – created by the Office of Citywide Emergency Communications, along with the Mayor’s Office of Data Analytics – measures every call segment involved in responding to an emergency, providing the full response time.

Contact:

Marc LaVorgna / Kamran Mumtaz (212) 788-2958