Abstract

911, What’s Your GIS Emergency? – Using GIS to Help Emergency Response
Track: Emergency Call Taking and Dispatch E911
Authors: Natalia Austin, RuthAnne Harbison

The City of Merced’s Police Department relies very heavily on GIS data, especially in their 911 dispatch system. However, the dispatchers were having difficulty geocoding an address whenever the police officers would call in an incident location as “100 Block of Main St” etc., since the block locations did not exist within the GIS data. MCAG found a solution to create block address points by modifying an existing address point file using simple data field calculations and Python scripting.