Some 911 centers can’t keep tabs on cell phones

Donnie and Sharon Leutjen and their 15-year-old granddaughter, Taron Leutjen, were found June 9. They had been shot to death, and their bodies had lain in their home in Cole Camp, Mo., for about two days.

Authorities know approximately when the Leutjens were shot because they got a 911 call on the night of June 7.

On the tape of the call — which investigators examined after the worried inquiries of someone who knew the family led to the bodies' discovery — “one of the male voices was directing Sharon Leutjen to sit down (and) put her arms behind her,” the sheriff’s office in Benton County, in central Missouri, said in court documents. “At least two threats to shoot her and the other two victims” could be heard, the sheriff’s office said.

So why didn’t deputies rush to the scene as soon as they got the call?

They couldn’t. They didn’t know where it came from. Whoever made the call used a cell phone, and Benton County’s technology isn’t advanced enough to take advantage of location services that are standard features of nearly all cell phones sold today.

Benton County isn’t an isolated example. Cell phones may lure us with the promise of immediate help in an emergency, but depending on where you live, that promise can go unkept because of inadequate technology at one or both ends of a 911 call.

“Access to 911 from cell phones is very different from wired phones and also varies greatly around the country,” said the National Emergency Number Association, or NENA, the nonprofit industry group that works with governments to promote and institute 911 programs across North America.

In places that haven’t upgraded their 911 centers to the latest technology, “this presents life-threatening problems due to lost response time” if callers are unable to speak or don’t know where they are, the organization said.

That’s why emergency officials and wireless industry leaders say every household should have a centrally located, easily accessible land line for emergency calls. But increasingly, Americans are dropping their land lines and going wireless-only. Some systems find only a cell tower
The problem is that, by definition, a mobile phone can be anywhere. It isn’t tied to an address, which automatically pops up on a 911 operator’s screen during a call from a land line. As cell phones have morphed into all-in-one multimedia toolboxes, U.S. carriers have integrated technology to use Global Positioning System satellites or their own towers to triangulate a phone’s location. It’s called Enhanced 911, or E911, and under Federal Communications Commission regulations, such capability must be built in to at least 95 percent of the phones a carrier sells.

But that information is only as good as the 911 infrastructure.

A decade after the Wireless Communications and Public Safety Act was enacted in 1999, requiring cell phone carriers to provide a caller’s location to 911, about 10 percent of the nation’s more than 6,000 call centers haven’t installed the equipment to use the information, NENA found in February. Those jurisdictions still offer only 1990s-vintage basic 911, which rely on callers’ knowing where they are and being able to communicate that.

“On cell phones, we do not have an exact location,” said Ken White, operations manager of the 911 center in Tulsa, Okla., which has asked for state help to pay for an E911 upgrade that will show a cell phone’s location and call-back number. Such information often isn’t now available, even though a little more than half of Tulsa’s 911 calls come in from cell phones, about the same proportion as they do nationwide.