By There are three ways to contact 911 on campus, by calling, texting and using the blue light emergency towers.
Emergency towers serve as phones to connect with 911 dispatchers. University Police Department Chief John Brockie said other campuses have removed this resource due to their expense but they still remain at Long Beach State.
According to Brockie, there are 109 emergency towers on campus.
Calls from emergency towers are frequently from people who request the Night Safety Escort Program or misplace their cars.
Broken emergency towers are labeled or covered with a bag. The towers are tested monthly, according to Brockie, and UPD considers whether the repairs are economical.
According to the UPD’s communications and information systems manager Gregory Pascal, 911 dispatchers receive around a dozen calls a day, including calls from campus, neighborhoods, the surrounding city and freeways.
Dispatchers train to work through multiple emergencies, but Pascal said it takes a year for new dispatchers to feel knowledgeable.
“There’s a fair amount of thinking on your feet and solving problems and coming up with creative solutions,” Pascal said.
UPD can also locate callers who need to remain silent due to dangerous situations with a location range provided through 911 calls.
According to Pascal, dispatchers ask yes or no questions when they sense a caller cannot speak.
With no specific address, dispatchers must listen for background noises to find a caller’s location. In these cases, they will have police in the area sound their sirens to hear them over the phone.
A caller’s location is imperative information. If someone is unable to call, they can text 911.
“That actually started here at Cal State Long Beach,” Pascal said. “This was the first place in the state of California where you could send a text message to 911.”
In 2013, UPD volunteered to be part of the California Governor’s Office Emergency Services (CalOES) pilot program for deploying text-to-911 services. They were the first pilot site that was ready and on Nov. 20, 2013, they received their first 911 text.
Pascal encourages the campus community to “call if you can and text if you can’t,” because it is more difficult to find someone’s location and communicate with them through text.
“If you are in a situation where you think you might be needing to dial 911, that’s the point where you should be calling us,” Pascal said.
According to Brockie, dispatchers evaluate each call to send the appropriate resources and LBPD’s assistance is requested when UPD no longer has resources for it.
This article was edited to remove redundancies on Sept. 4 at 5:06 p.m.
