When Frances Ramirez, 9, didn’t come home from classes at Mount Vernon Community School on Feb. 8, her parents became concerned. As afternoon turned into night, concern mounted into worry. By the time they called the Alexandria Police Department shortly after 7 p.m., the Arlandria parents were in a full-fledged panic.
"We searched all the north-south streets between Mount Vernon Avenue and the 800 block of West Glebe," said Lt. Scott Gibson, who was overseeing the search for the girl. "We tried shopping centers, schools, movie theaters, everything. And it was such a bitterly cold night that we were really worried about her safety."
Instead of investing more shoe leather — and wasting precious time — Gibson decided to use a high-tech system known as Emergency Notification System to find the 9-year-old girl. He booted up a dedicated terminal in their communications center at the Mill Road police headquarters and went to work. Locating the girl’s house in the middle of an imaginary circle, the software found every landline telephone in a quarter of a mile from the house. A Spanish-speaking officer recorded a message describing the girl and explaining the situation. Within minutes, the system was calling selected Arlandria addresses.
“The system can make anywhere between 2,000 to 3,000 calls an hour," said Lt. Chris Wemple, commander of the department’s communications section. “And the system is intelligent enough to know when it gets an answering machine as opposed to a real person, and we can program it to keep calling until it gets a live person.”
A few blocks from the girl’s house, the parents of one of her friends received a call. They thought the girl’s parents knew here whereabouts. But when they got the automated call from the Alexandria Police Department, they realized what had happened and quickly took the girl home. Francis was home within 30 minutes of activating the system.
“It’s a good thing that we programmed the system to play the Spanish version first before the English version,” said Wemple. “The friend’s parents’ home was a Spanish speaking household, and they would have hung up if they received an automated call that was in English.”
THE SYSTEM WORKS as a sort of reverse 911, making calls from the police to citizens in a time of emergency. Created by Dialogic Communications, a Tennessee-based corporation, the technology has a wide range of potential uses. Aside from locating a missing girl, the system can also be used during a major health crisis.
“In a medical emergency, health-care organizations must be able to communicate up-to-the-minute details to personnel,” said Gene Kirby, president of Dialogic, in a press release touting the evolving uses of the system. “This is especially important now that experts believe a pandemic outbreak is just on the horizon.”
Wemple said that Alexandria’s system has been put into action about four or five times a year since it was instituted in 2003. Last year, it was used to notify homes that were threatened by a flood and residents who lived near a downed power line. When the Secret Service announced that President Gerald Ford’s funeral motorcade would be using Washington Street, the department used the system to notify businesses and homes along the route.
“The system can make 45 calls at once, so it’s extremely efficient,” said Wemple. “In the case of the Ford motorcade situation, it would have been impossible for us to notify all those businesses and homes because we were dealing with such a tight timeframe. But the Emergency Notification System was able to do it in no time — and with very little personnel investment.”
But there’s one catch. The system calls only landlines — no cell phones. So in a society that’s increasingly abandoning landlines in favor of cell phones, the technology will become increasingly less useful. According to a market research report from Research and Markets, 9 percent of United States wireless subscribers are cell phone only. By 2009, the study estimated, that figure will increase to 37 percent. Police spokesman Lt. Jamie Bartlett said that the trend is worrisome but not enough to ditch the system.
“You have to work with what you have to work with,” said Bartlett. “I can imagine a day when this technology could expand to include all of the cell phones that are in a given area.”