We have absolutely one topic.

I'll turn it over to our manager.

So we talk a lot about um uh Chesapeake Strategic Anchors, everything we do uh being aligned to make sure we we help make Chesapeake an exceptional place to live, learn work, farm, and play, providing outstanding service to our customers and our community and being fiscally responsible and sustainable.

And as we move further into the 21st century, it's really clear that that technology will be an important part of delivering those services.

Um the growth in artificial intelligence has been astronomical over the past few years, and the applications are growing every day.

And so the police department is here to brief us up a little bit on ways that we intend to utilize technology to provide uh again provide that outstanding service, doing it in a fiscally responsible manner, but to do so in a way um that we don't lose our small town feel.

So we're really really cognizant of the fact that um you know the power of our our our teammates is really important to keeping that small town feel.

Um so the uh um uh police will go through a little bit about uh some of the things we're doing, and then I'll close with uh um some applications uh um for the entire organization in the future.

So I'll turn it over to uh um uh Captain uh Major Lanfair.

Council, thank you for having us here tonight.

This won't be a terribly long uh presentation for you, but I'm gonna have Lieutenant Justin Bowman who is sitting to my left here.

Uh Justin is the um 911 coordinator for the City of Chesapeake, and uh so I'm gonna have him talk a little bit about a pretty exciting program uh known as Amazon Connect.

Good evening, counsel, manager, and mayor.

Like uh assistant chief said, I'm Lieutenant Bowman.

I'm the 911 coordinator here in Chesapeake, and I've been in that role for about 14 months.

So we're gonna go ahead and get started.

The first slide is just some information about our current staffing in the 911 center.

Our current staffing is we have 46 of 68 positions filled.

We have a 33 percent vacancy.

Twenty-two of those are broken down into our dispatcher one and twos, and our we have six telecommunicator call taker spots that are vacant.

In the graph to the right, you'll see our overtime that was worked and the needs in the center for October, November, and December of 2024.

Last month, just real quick.

There was a need for 188 hours of overtime in the center.

Of that 1808-1569 was worked by our dispatchers.

The call volume, we average about 20,000 calls a month.

The the orange line is our non-emergency call volume, and the blue line is our 911 call count.

The following slide is our call answer time.

The green line is uh the NINA standard where they would like to see the majority of 911 calls answered in under 15 seconds.

We answer on average October, November, December, around the 80, 81 percent of our calls in under 15 seconds.

The orange the orange line covers our the under the 20 seconds.

So we answer on average 84, 85 percent of our 911 calls in under 20 seconds.

So one of the things that I think a lot of the general public don't realize is that when you call the non-emergency number for the police department, you're getting the same exact dispatchers that are answering the 911 calls.

So the more calls that come in, even on the non-emergency line, the more likely that is to tie up the dispatchers who are available to answer 911 calls.

Now, obviously, if they're on a non-emergency call, they can certainly place that call on hold and switch over, but it does affect the amount of time that we can answer those 911 calls.

And what Justin's talking about with the NINA standards, that's the national standard.

Uh, I think it stands for National Emergency Number Association.

Um, that's the national association that kind of oversees how dispatch centers across the United States should operate.

And so we really want to kind of be up there near that 90 percent threshold where 90 percent of our 911 calls are being answered in less than 15 seconds.

And as you're gonna see here on the next slide, that we're we're kind of missing the mark there a little bit, and it and it's at no fault to the dispatchers, it's just merely a staffing issue.

So our 2024 year in review, total 911 calls answered was 110,612 non-emergency was 127, 366.

I added in the Texan I1 was 433.

Our average answer call time was 14.82 seconds.

And the last line highlights again the overall need in the center where our dispatches worked 11,500 hours of overtime last year.

So again, the the average call wait time for 911 is 15 seconds and for non-emergencies 48 seconds.

I I ran the longest wait time for 911 earlier this year, and we found a call that held for nine minutes and three seconds and a non-emergency call that held for 15 minutes and six seconds.

So Amazon Connect it's an AI that automates the answering of our non-emergency line.

It will only be for our non-emergency line.

It will not be for the 911 line.

When needed, non-emergency calls can be automatically routed to 911 as part of specific Amazon Connect workflows.

One of the really kind of cool things about Amazon Connect is so Amazon will collect information uh about the types of calls that we get into the 911 center.

Again, you might be surprised that people often call the 911 center uh the non-emergency line for a wide variety of non-police related issues.

When is my trash get picked up?

How do I pay for a red light ticket?

What day, you know, are the courts open?

Uh you know, it could a lot of innocuous uh types of questions that ties up those dispatchers' time.

So the idea behind Amazon Connect is the system can recognize these types of natural language requests and provide that information in an automated way in a way that doesn't sound automated, and we'll play a recording here shortly for you, uh, that kind of gives them that information without ever actually physically having to talk to a human dispatcher.

But one thing I want to assure you of is that at any given time the individual can always hit a certain button and be taken to a live dispatcher.

But the the hope is that most of the time the system will be able to answer the questions they have.

Now, one of the other really exciting things is that the system is customizable on the fly.

So for example, let's say hypothetically, not that this would ever happen, but the Centerville bridge is stuck open.