How Brazos County 911 used Axon 911 live location feature to find a mother in distress
"We're translators for the public. We have to figure out what they're seeing and what they're saying and match it up to a location to get somebody there. And it's frustrating when we can't. Being able to send a live location link saves a lot of time."
— Kris Fox, Communications Manager, Brazos County 911
When someone is frightened, disoriented, or in crisis, the simplest question a dispatcher can ask is often the hardest one to answer. “What is your location?” They describe what they see, perhaps a landmark that means something to them. Or they might be in a completely unfamiliar location altogether.
That gap between what a caller can say and what a dispatcher needs to know can delay response and change outcomes. It's also where technology can make all the difference.
Brazos County 911 handles 100,000 calls a year, 43,000 of them emergencies, dispatching police, fire, and EMS for the City of Bryan, TX and the surrounding county with a team of 40 dispatchers. On a recent shift, a call came in that captured exactly what that gap looks like in real time, and how outcomes improve when the right tool closes it.
The Call
A woman called in distress. She was on a bridge near the Aggieland Expressway, she said, with her three small children. The call had come in through intake and she had been asked to call 911 directly for a better location, but she didn't. Whether from confusion or distress, no one could say for certain. The call stayed where it was.
On the other end of the line was Angelina Lewis, a dispatcher who was in training at the time, working the call with her trainer Chandler Freeman observing. They had a woman in crisis, an approximate area, but no actual address.
Thanks to Axon 911, they had one more option.
Chandler asked Angelina to send the caller a live location link. The caller clicked the link and a pin finally dropped on the screen.
As it turned out, she wasn't near the Aggieland Expressway in Brazos County at all. She was in Plantersville, a completely different county. Without the location pin, the team would have been working through a map, asking about landmarks, tracing a route from Bryan through to Houston trying to narrow it down through description alone.
Instead, thanks to the live location feature, they knew exactly where she was and the appropriate county was contacted immediately for a welfare check.
What the Technology Actually Does
Kris Fox has been in emergency communications long enough to know what it looks like when words fail. Callers describe what they see, not where they are. They give mailing addresses that belong to neighbors, or intersections that exist in three counties.
"People's words sometimes don't English very well," Kris said. "And that's a big thing, having us figure out what they're seeing and what they're saying and match it up to a location to get somebody there."
Axon 911 live location feature removes that gap. It doesn't ask the caller to describe anything. It asks them to click a link and let their phone do the rest. For a caller who is scared, disoriented, or unfamiliar with the area, that's not a small thing. It's the difference between a response that finds them in time and one that gets delayed.
Every Tool, From Day One
Brazos County 911 gives trainees access to their full toolkit. From the moment a trainee steps onto the floor, they have everything a seasoned dispatcher has, including transcription, translation, live location. "They have access to all the tools our dispatchers do," Kris said.
The six-month program moves trainees from classroom to floor to live calls, with a trainer observing at every step. By the time Angelina was taking calls with Chandler watching, the tools were already familiar.
That's what training with the full toolkit looks like in practice.
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