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In a recent poll of 911 professionals, 92% of respondents indicated that emergency call-takers are responsible for handling their agency’s non-emergency call volume. In the same poll, 83% of respondents said that non-emergency call volume has created hold times for their agency.
Non-emergency calls are causing emergency 911 calls to be left waiting…but how did we get here?
Prepared sat down with past NENA President Monica Million to discuss…
How 911 became the all-in-one community service center
The type of incidents that make up the bulk of non-emergency, or 10-digit line, calls weren’t always 911’s to handle. In the late 2000s, according to Million, with government services retracting, local administrations needed somewhere to direct concerned community members who needed help from the government.
“Where the government was retracting those services, elected officials, city managers, county administrators thought, ‘Oh, let's direct our citizens to call the 10-digit line in the 911 center and let them take the work,’ and many of us had no recourse. We would always ask to be assigned FTEs for that duty and, of course, that was laughed at.
“We became the de facto default for all government services and customer service in many communities. It came with no training, it came with no budget, and, through this act by our administrations, we all of the sudden found ourselves answering phones for county assessors, animal control services, some city utilities, some sanitation after hours…and you're just like, what are we doing?”
Suddenly, the core job of 911 was impacted by these new responsibilities.
“I'm paying thousands of dollars to train people in life-saving instructions and now I'm answering whether somebody's cat got out.”
Downstream impacts for 911 and the community
At first, Monica says, it was easy to simply prioritize 911 calls with 10-digit line calls being put on hold. As 10-digit calls increased, the problem became harder to deprioritize and staff grew frustrated.
“Telecommunicators are trained to be professionals. They came to this job to make a difference. They learned life-saving techniques and now they're answering questions they were never trained to answer in the first place.”
It reached the point where her team was making their own cheat sheets for things like sanitation or animal control.
“We would do the best we could with the citizens and, I would argue, we probably were not providing a high level of customer service to our communities at that time.”
Unfortunately, as decades have passed, the situation has hardly changed. According to Million, due to budget issues, many communities have never successfully created any kind of 311 line, leaving 911 centers as the only option.
“In most cases, the work never left us. The call volumes increased.”
With elected officials directing community members to the 10-digit line, a high-level of service was expected. Without training, however, even expert, seasoned telecommunicators were left to do their best with limited resources.
“The citizenry never knew that we never got training. And did any of those departments as the government services began to expand back out, did they take that work back? No. And we were left holding the bag. Now, it accounts for 70 to 75% of the workload in most 911 centers. When you tell people that, they're absolutely floored.”
Operating in 2025’s “staffing scenario”
What many in 911 refer to as the staffing crisis, Monica has begun calling a different name.
“I talk to directors all over the country all the time and say, ‘Look, you can no longer describe our staffing situation as a crisis. This is our norm.’ We have been unable to staff this role in our country successfully in a majority of the cases for a couple of decades. We're unable to attract because of our practices.
“So I tell directors and managers, you still have to do the business, right? There's an expectation by your leadership, city or county administration, that you're going to continue to answer the call, but 911s still have to be the priority in your community, so you've got to get that workload off your folks' desk.”
How? Simple, Monica says: technology.
“You do that by using AI tools because the expectation is we're still carrying the workload but the reality is we don't have enough humans. At the end of the day, that 911 call is still the most important thing. We spend thousands of dollars to train these people to be emergency number professionals…[let’s] get that work that was never intended to be on our desk in the first place off our desk.
“You're talking about moving 30 to 40% of a work of the 10 digit line workload off their desk. That is a huge, huge thing.”
Reduce burdens, protect mental health
Addressing the non-emergency problem is not just about removing workload to increase focus on 911 calls: it’s about removing workload to give telecommunicators a breath.
“I had a director in the Midwest tell me, ‘Well, we can take those calls when we're not answering 911 calls,’ and I said, ‘I don't think so. Let's talk about the mental health of our professionals.’
“All we've done for the last several decades is: you hang up the phone from the baby dying and you take the next call and it's an active shooter. You hang up the phone from that, you take the next call, it's somebody drowning. You hang up the phone, you take the next call, it's somebody being kidnapped.
“How about if, for the mental health and well-being of our people, maybe they get to sit there for two minutes and not answer the phone, especially if it's as simple as a property line dispute?”
Access to mental health resources for 911 professionals is often limited by their classification, which prevents them from experiencing the same benefits as their fellow first responders in the field.
“We don't have access and have never had access to the same mental health resources…Most of the people that I come into contact with are 20-year veterans. For half their career, they've had no access, no consideration, no discussion about what is happening with their mental well-being.
“We haven't had the tools to do the things we need to do to take care of ourselves. Until they give us equity on the classification, I fear that the future 911 telecommunicators are going to continue to not have those.”
While that fight continues, Monica says, we need to do everything we can to support our professionals in as many ways as possible.
Looking forward
Monica believes that solutions like Prepared’s can help evolve a status quo that’s remained stagnant for too long.
“I think the solution that prepared offers really is about the evolution of the service model that we have built inside the 911 center. It's about asking how we leverage those language translation capabilities? How do we leverage the transcription capabilities? How do we leverage the AI non-emergency tools? Because the way we're doing business is not working anymore.”
To explore that solution, click here.
