As of this semester, JCUPD has implemented an AI dispatching software to the campus community. When students, faculty or staff pick up the phone in an emergency, they will first be met with a chatbot instead of a human officer.
This change is due to a decision made by the third-party dispatching system JCUPD uses, called Central Dispatch. “By subscribing to their service… we have to go along with it,” said Chief of JCUPD Jeffrey Daberko.
The dispatching system works by allowing the AI service to make a decision about the level of severity of the emergency and will either keep callers on the line to follow a series of prompts or send them to a human dispatcher if the emergency is urgent. If the caller stays on the line with AI dispatch, they can explain their situation and who they are to the AI dispatcher. Then, the dispatcher will summarize the discussion and send it to JCUPD through the third-party system.
Central Dispatch considers AI to help with efficiency when responding to calls rather than only allowing human dispatching systems. However, Daberko said, “I haven’t seen a great change. I haven’t noticed that it’s taking shorter or longer.”
Despite this uncertain conclusion, Chief Daberko explained that AI in police dispatching is becoming more and more common. “University Heights Police Department does not have in-house dispatch either. No one does anymore in policing, with the exception of very large organizations like the Cleveland Police,” he said.
This means that students or other John Carroll community members who are uncertain or untrusting of AI will not be able to avoid using artificial intelligence when calling in an emergency. When a caller dials JCUPD’s phone number, they will be met with AI unless their emergency requires human intervention.
Mark Sheldon, an AI faculty fellow and Certified Information Systems auditor, explained that this could pose an issue in an emergency. “In an instance where something terrible just happened, and someone can’t get the right words out because they’re so scared… is the system going to pick up on their nervousness and their inflections?”
If the AI system is probabilistic, there could be many trigger words or language that could prompt a change to human dispatch. Probabilistic AI generates new ideas each time it is asked a question, meaning that it uses the information that it has to produce a unique outcome each time.
If the AI system is deterministic, however, callers would have to use language that the AI dispatcher has been trained on to get a switch to human dispatch in the emergency situation. Deterministic AI would need specific “trigger words” to transfer a call to human dispatch and could be determined by “data training the system to determine the real things or the things that don’t need to be escalated that quickly.” There is little information about how this specific AI model used by Central Dispatch was trained.
This AI dispatching system could also result in faster response times to most calls by filtering out pranks and other less immediate police issues. “AI agents can sort through 1,000 calls and then filter in the 10 that they think are most important,” Sheldon said. Chief Daberko also explained that AI was implemented to increase efficiency. “As you try to get more and more efficiencies, that’s kind of the way things are going.”
If students have trouble with the system, Chief Daberko said to contact JCUPD immediately. If there is a problem, “I want to know about it and I want to investigate it,” he said. All questions about Central Dispatch and the AI dispatching system can be answered by contacting [email protected].
