Why automated, unattended public signals are essential during emergencies
Introduction: When Silence Is Most Dangerous
It is not difficult to imagine the scenario.
A city faces a sudden, fast-moving crisis. It could be a severe storm, an earthquake, or a widespread power outage. Given recent news, it is not at all a stretch to imagine a period of civil unrest: large demonstrations, counter-protests, spontaneous gatherings, or enforcement actions that draw crowds into the streets. Roads are blocked. Traffic patterns change without warning. Emergency vehicles move quickly through dense areas. Conditions evolve by the minute. Police, fire, and medical resources are stretched thin across multiple neighborhoods at once. Dispatch centers are overwhelmed. Command staff are focused on life-safety decisions, crowd management, and resource allocation in real time.
At the same time, the public begins looking for information. People refresh agency websites. They check online dispatch pages. They open social media apps, hoping to learn whether they should avoid certain areas, reroute their commute, stay indoors, or simply keep their distance. But instead of finding immediate answers or guidance, they find thousands of others asking the same question: “What’s the helicopter saying?”
This silence is not usually intentional. It is the predictable result of how emergency communication systems are now designed. Increasingly, public safety information depends on someone having the time to notice an event, decide it should be shared, write a message, and publish it. During moments of natural disaster or civil unrest, that time disappears first. Public safety communication has quietly shifted from being treated as infrastructure to being treated as optional messaging. When systems are under stress—whether from environmental disaster or human activity—that shift can leave the public unaware, unprepared, and potentially in danger.
“What’s the helicopter saying?“
Why This Is a Public Safety Issue — Not a Media Issue
High-risk incidents affect more than the immediate police perimeter. Emergency operations can involve loud explosive devices audible hundreds of feet away, chemical agents that drift downwind, sudden road closures without warning, and emergency vehicles moving unpredictably through busy areas. The same is true during periods of unrest, when crowds form quickly and conditions can change block by block. People nearby do not need tactical details to stay safe. They need awareness.
There is often a great deal of secrecy around police SWAT operations, and that secrecy is rarely questioned. Yet these are not surprise military raids in third world countries. They take place in cities, in plain view, with residents, commuters, and bystanders all around. In most cases, the subject of the operation is well aware what is unfolding outside. Meanwhile, the people most affected by the lack of information are not suspects, but the public—people who are simply trying to decide where it is safe to go.
When no public signal exists, people assume normalcy. They continue into areas they might otherwise avoid. They make decisions based on the absence of information rather than the presence of risk. This is not about satisfying curiosity or feeding news cycles. It is about giving the public enough information when that information is relevant to make basic safety decisions.
The Shift Nobody Voted On
No single policy decision created this problem. It emerged gradually as several reasonable changes were layered on top of one another.
Many law enforcement agencies moved to encrypted radio systems, citing officer safety, privacy, and operational security¹. Encryption itself is not the failure. The failure is that encryption removed a continuous public signal without consistently providing an automated replacement. Where the public once had imperfect but real situational awareness—by listening to dispatch traffic and recognizing patterns—there is now silence unless an agency actively chooses to speak.
At the same time, public-facing dispatch websites changed. Many now show only a fraction of actual calls, often after delays that suggest human review rather than automatic publishing. These pages can give the impression that little is happening even when the reality on the street is heavy activity. Fire and medical responses, which once acted as secondary signals of serious incidents, are also increasingly filtered from public view. When those indicators disappear, the public loses its ability to understand the scale or urgency of events without knowing sensitive details.
Finally, agencies have leaned heavily on social media platforms to communicate with the public. These platforms are familiar and fast under normal conditions, but they are discretionary, dependent on individual action, and unreliable during periods of peak demand. The larger issue with reliance on social media is that they are not designed to broadcast public safety information. They are driven by algorithms that decide what content to show you to keep you engaged, so instead of getting a timely alerts about an event in your area, you may be shown fluffy kittens instead.
Each of these changes made sense on its own. Together, they created a system that, when stressed, usually outputs nothing.
“They are driven by algorithms that decide what content to show you to keep you engaged, so instead of getting a timely alerts about an event in your area, you may be shown fluffy kittens instead.“
The Problem, Clearly Stated
The modern system for communicating safety information to the public does not suffer from a single flaw. It fails in several specific, identifiable ways. Together, these failures have removed situational awareness that once existed by default.
First, the public has lost its continuous source of real-time awareness.
For decades, the public, media, and community observers could listen to police and fire dispatch channels. While imperfect and sometimes confusing, this access provided a steady, passive signal of what was happening across a city. Patterns were visible. Escalations were noticeable. People did not need official permission to understand that something serious was unfolding nearby. As police radio systems moved to full encryption, that shared awareness disappeared. What had been a continuous signal was replaced with silence unless an agency later chose to publish something. Time is of the essence when it comes to public safety information. The value of knowing about an emergency event approaches zero when the knowledge of it can no longer help any decisions that can be made.
Second, public awareness now depends on discretionary, human-driven communication through fragile channels.
Once the automatic signal disappeared, it was replaced by systems that require people to actively decide to communicate. During emergencies, the same staff managing the incident are often responsible for deciding whether and how to inform the public. Information must be noticed, written, approved, and published from a logged-in device, then survive platform outages and algorithmic visibility. If no one has the time, capacity, or authority to do this, the system produces nothing. Awareness becomes dependent on availability rather than urgency.
Third, the resulting communication is neither durable nor reliably accessible.
Much of today’s public safety information exists only as social media posts or web updates that are not designed to function as stable government records. They can be edited, deleted, buried, or lost when platforms change, complicating public records retention, after-action review, and accountability². At the same time, these systems often fail basic accessibility expectations. They assume visual interfaces, specific platforms, active accounts, and modern devices. People who rely on assistive technologies, text-only access, or alternative formats are often left behind, especially during emergencies when accessibility matters most.
Taken together, these failures explain why silence has become common during exactly the moments when awareness matters most. This is not a debate about transparency versus secrecy. It is a system-design failure. Silence is not neutral. In public safety, silence creates risk.
A Quiet Disconnect: When Public Safety Information Is Treated as Optional
One of the clearest signs that public safety communication is no longer treated as infrastructure is how easily public-facing systems can be removed or altered without public explanation.
In late 2025, San Diego’s Fire Dispatch Online webpage—the City’s only real-time, public-facing source of fire and emergency medical dispatch activity—was taken offline without advance notice. There was no public statement explaining why it was removed, what information would no longer be visible, or what alternative source should be used instead.
A California Public Records Act (CPRA) request was submitted to understand whether the change reflected a policy decision rather than a technical failure. The records confirmed that the page was removed intentionally due to an emergency request, so that certain events could be blacklisted³. Looking past the various CPRA state law violations in the process, we found exactly what we set out to learn, even with whole pages redacted. More important than the internal process, however, was the outcome: a widely used public safety information source intentionally disappeared for three weeks without any thought or discussion on public safety impact.
This illustrates a broader issue. Public-facing dispatch pages—both police and fire—are increasingly treated as optional features rather than essential safety infrastructure. They may show only a fraction of real-world activity, apply undisclosed filtering, or be removed altogether without clear public standards. There may be significant delays on showing the information, and if the information does appear, it is stripped of any valuable information that can inform the public. As a result, residents can no longer assume that the absence of information means the absence of risk.
Intentional Communication Versus Automatic Signals
Intentional communication—press releases, briefings, social media posts—will always be important. These messages provide context, explanation, and verified facts. But they depend on human judgment and availability. Automatic communication serves a different role. It is not polished. It is often incomplete. It does not claim to be perfect. But it is reliable in one critical way: it is always present. It continues when people are overwhelmed, distracted, or unavailable. Public safety once relied on both. Over time, the automatic layer eroded, leaving only the intentional one. That inversion is the core failure. A system that requires judgment to operate is least reliable when judgment is under the greatest strain.
The Limits of Third-Party Feeds
It is important to acknowledge that San Diego provides a public-facing fire and medical incident feed through PulsePoint. PulsePoint serves a valuable purpose, particularly for alerting nearby volunteers to cardiac arrests.
However, PulsePoint was not designed to function as a general public safety information system. By design, it groups many very different incidents under broad labels such as “Medical Emergency.” From the public’s perspective, there is no way to distinguish between a routine medical call, a serious accident, or a violent incident where there may be danger present. The reality is that if someone was just shot on your street, it will probably be censored from PulsePoint. Situations that require very different responses from the public appear identical.
This is not a failure of PulsePoint. It reflects the fact that the platform was built for a specific purpose. The problem arises when third-party tools are treated as substitutes for city-owned, city-controlled public information systems.
Accessibility as a Design Signal, Not a Side Issue
In 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice finalized new rules under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act requiring state and local governments to make their web-based services accessible under WCAG 2.1 Level AA standards⁶. Large entities must comply by April 2026, and smaller entities by April 2027.
A basic review of existing public-facing dispatch pages shows that many do not meet these standards. Social media platforms, which agencies increasingly rely on as substitutes, present similar challenges and offer no formal certifications of accessibility conformance. This matters not because it creates a narrow compliance issue, but because it exposes the same design weakness: systems built around manual posts and visual interfaces are harder to make accessible, harder to audit, and harder to rely on during emergencies.
Structured, machine-readable public data supports accessibility by default. When public safety communication is treated as infrastructure, accessibility improves naturally.
“Expose All → Filter Smart → Publish Automatically“
A Better Model: Some Achievable Practical Guidelines
Guideline 1: Expose All → Filter Smart → Publish Automatically
This proposal does not argue for releasing sensitive details. It argues for restoring resilience. Under California law, government data is presumed public by default, with limited exceptions⁴. Public safety information does not need to be delayed or hidden first and released later.
Sensitive elements—personally identifiable information, tactical notes, phone numbers, gate codes, officer identities—can be filtered automatically. Line item details can then be shared. Dispatchers can mark specific lines as non-public when needed. What remains should be published by default through an unattended public pipeline without any delay.
The public signal does not need to explain everything. It needs to acknowledge that something is happening. Event existence, nature of the incident, approximate location, time, and status are enough to restore awareness without compromising safety. Details are even more helpful for the public to understand. A working example of this model is the California Highway Patrol. Their online CAD portal provides up to the second detailed information about incidents, locations, hazards, road closures, traffic signals not working, and requires no additional actions from CHP staff for this data to be share widely⁵.
Guideline 2: Public Safety Data as Civic Infrastructure
A standardized, machine-readable public incident feed allows information to reach people in many ways at once. Machine readable formats such as XML, JSON, REST, are all formats that would allow developers to use the information in innovative ways to share with the public. Media outlets can distribute alerts. Mapping tools can show nearby hazards. Accessibility systems can translate or read information aloud. Communities can rely on predictable signals rather than sporadic posts.
Public agencies should also recognize that merely putting some tables on a website is only helpful for people using web browsers. They are generally a poor way for downstream users of data, such as a public safety app, to receive information from an agency. It’s slow, brittle, and is prone to failure.
Social media and public facing web pages do not need to disappear. They simply needs to move downstream. Automated feeds can populate websites, alert systems, and social platforms simultaneously, while human-written messages add context without blocking awareness.
“It is simply human nature to not trust someone that holds everything secret“
Guideline 3: Build Trust, Accountability, and Oversight
It is simply human nature to not trust someone that holds everything secret. The City of San Diego recognized this 11 years ago, and the City Council strongly supported Mayor Faulconer’s Open Data Policy in 2014. In fact, this had been a trend going on in both local and federal government levels since 2007, called Open Government Data and is now codified into federal law for federal agencies since 2017. It is the basic concept that allows the public to see and inspect their government. It leads to improved efficiency, holding all levels of government accountable, can expose corruption, and overall helps build confidence with citizens that their government is functioning well.
When it comes to open data and police departments, accountability is generally viewed as an attack. The public does frequently question police actions, so the natural reaction is to put up a defensive wall around everything they do. However the only way to improve outcomes is to have an external feedback loop into the process. When the public has first hand knowledge of what went wrong, and sees the correction being made, confidence grows quickly. But when incidents are hidden from all, and only learned about by carefully crafted records requests and court documents, they appear as scandals, and confidence plummets.
Public records enable after-action review, independent verification, and institutional learning. They reveal trends. Without consistent public signals, failures are harder to evaluate and easier to repeat. Trust is built through predictability. When systems go quiet during emergencies or unrest, skepticism grows—and that skepticism has real safety consequences.
Oversight responsibility does not rest with police or fire leadership alone. Their role is operational control. The responsibility for public-facing communication infrastructure belongs with elected bodies that fund, authorize, and set requirements for these systems.
Final Thoughts: Designing for the Worst Day and Every Other Day
Public safety communication should not depend on goodwill, discretion, or someone having time to hit “post.” Those are fragile dependencies, and fragile systems fail when the stakes are highest. This is true during earthquakes and storms. It is also true during periods of civil unrest, when conditions shift quickly and the public most needs clear, neutral signals about where danger may exist.
However, what effects more people over a longer stretch of time is the day to day low level incidents where the danger may simply be a car thief checking door handles on your street, or the armed robbery suspect they could not locate.
The problem does not require radical transparency or new technology nor does it have any real costs to implement. It requires recognizing public awareness as a core safety function and designing systems that work unattended, under stress, and for everyone.
The remaining question is whether elected leadership is willing to insist on that standard.
Footnotes
¹ International Association of Chiefs of Police, “Critical Issues: Encryption & Going Dark,” Source Link
² California Government Code §§ 7920.000–7931.000 (California Public Records Act), Source Link
³ California Public Records Act request regarding San Diego Fire Dispatch Online webpage, Request No. 25-8465, filed October 2025, Source Link.
⁴ California Government Code § 7922.525, Source Link.
⁵ California Highway Patrol, “Traffic Incident Information,” public computer-aided dispatch (CAD) data portal, Source Link.
⁶ U.S. Department of Justice, Nondiscrimination on the Basis of Disability; Accessibility of Web Information and Services of State and Local Government Entities, Final Rule, 28 C.F.R. pt. 35 (2024), Source Link.