When 911 Operators Can't Find Their Callers

On police TV dramas, cellphones allow cops to do seemingly miraculous things. GPS can track kidnapping victims from a cellphone stashed in the trunk of a moving car, or pinpoint a call to a single creepy basement. But in reality, figuring out the exact location of a cellphone -- and accurately transmitting that location to an operator -- is nearly impossible. In most cases, that doesn’t make a difference. Most people who call 911 know where they are, and can communicate it clearly to the operator. But every so often callers don’t know where they’re located, or they’re in a situation where they can’t communicate their location out loud, forcing operators to spend precious seconds or minutes figuring out where they are.

“It’s costing you time,” says Jamie Barnett, former chief of the Federal Communications Commission's Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau, now the director of Find Me 911, an organization set up to lobby the FCC to adapt better location technology. “You go there and you say: Where is this person? I can’t see them; I can’t find them.”