Oakland leaders announce $2.5 million funding to improve 911 response times
OAKLAND, Calif. (KGO) -- Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao and city leaders announced on Monday a $2.5 million investment to strengthen the city's 911 response over the next two years.
Leaders are convinced this will help improve 911 response times.
This comes after the state gave the Oakland Police Department one year to speed up their 911 emergency response times or risk losing critical funding from the state or the ability to continue taking 911 calls altogether.
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According to the state, agencies must answer 90% of calls within 15 seconds to get state funding for 911 services.
Over the past year, Oakland has met that standard for about 46% of calls.
The funding is coming from the Oakland-Alameda Joint Power Authority, which has seen an increase in revenue.
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The mayor talked about some of the changes they plan to make.
"We are also preparing a major upgrade to our computer-aided dispatch system.. we all know this as the CAD system, which this will help connect responders to the scene of a call," Mayor Thao said. "All of this together will tie into how we can again respond stronger to our constituency. We have also taken steps to harden our phone system against future power outages we saw this past summer as well."
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Leaders say one issue contributing to the slower response times is staffing. Leaders say there are 16 vacant dispatcher positions and that they're making a major push to hire more dispatchers, such as recruitment events.
As far as how that $2.5 million will be spent, leaders said they're working on a spending plan now.
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