By Lenno Craig
A WELL-FUNCTIONING Emergency Call Response System (ECRS) is an indispensable arm of law enforcement and public security. As a condition of service, Telcos operating in Guyana are obligated to route emergency calls from customers free of cost. Since the privatisation of telecommunications, Guyana has struggled to maintain functional systems.

Certain sections of society were of the view that GTT was responsible for the entire architecture including hardware infrastructure, command centre operations, call termination and dispatching. GTT remained adamant that it is responsible only for the public leg of point-to-point call routing and termination to one or more locations identified by the government, all other infrastructural responsibilities rest with the government.

Though concerns about its dysfunctional condition remained a seething angst over the years, it was not until the tenure of Mr. Clement Rohee as the Minister of Home Affairs, who came under constant elbowing from the Private Sector Commission (PSC) headed at the time by Capt. Gerry Gouveia, that the government sought to take any action to operationalise the system, albeit after several rounds of lacklustre efforts.

It is apparent that Mr. Rohee saw the ECRS as a good but unnecessary auxiliary of mere decorative value to the public security apparatus. In an effort to shirk his responsibility he constantly sought to misdirect the PSC, mislead the nation and cast blame on GTT for its dysfunctional state. The PSC, struck either by its own gullibility or genuinely hoodwinked, publicly chastised GTT for its perceived incompetence and dereliction of duty.

GTT asserted that it has over the years provided all facilities in keeping with its mandate and has gone beyond its legal obligation by offering equipment and handsets which were either misused, neglected or destroyed due to maladministration. In fact, Capt. Gouveia was quoted in the press as saying, “People are dying, people are being hurt… The 911 system, in my view, is a national emergency and everybody from the President right down should not go to bed at night if this 911 system is not working and I am appalled that they do.”

During his tenure, Rohee issued a US$20,000 consultancy contract for review of the ECRS, but the nation was not informed who the contractor was or what procurement system was used. In fact, to this day, there is no trace of the consultancy report, probably part of Rohee’s infamous middle-finger ribaldry. Ironically, on the same day he gave the nation his middle finger, the nation gave him the boot.

When Mr. Ramjattan assumed responsibility for the security sector, he referred to the failure of the ECRS as a “major embarrassment” and made it a priority. In contrast to Rohee’s phantom consultancy, existing expertise from the Ministry of Public Security, Police Force, GTT and Digicel conducted joint evaluation at no cost to taxpayers. The recommendations were taken on board and Digicel was contracted to design and implement the system, which now functions to international standards.

A key feature of the design is that the three emergency numbers were merged (911 Police, 912 Fire and 913 Ambulance). Regardless of the nature of the emergency, citizens are required to dial 911 only. One development that may have gone unnoticed is that the Fire Service now operates a fully trained and staffed Ambulance Brigade or Emergency Medical Service (EMS) with an initial complement of five ambulances and more will be added over time. According to public utterances by Minister Ramjattan, he is not quite done yet, the modular systems will be integrated into one large framework called the Smart City System equipped with a modern command centre to view CCTV cameras mounted throughout the city to strengthen and interconnect the whole public security apparatus.

Social media is replete with unsolicited comments about positive contacts with the 911 system during emergencies, in one instance a young man reported placing a 911 call from an accident scene and given both anxiety control and first aid instructions by the dispatcher, while it took less than 10 minutes for the police, fire and EMS to arrive on the scene. I hope Gerry will at least allow “from the President right down” to at least take their nightly nap. Despite this laudable advancement there is one noticeable defect which the government should seek to rectify urgently, lack of public education as is evident by the inordinately large number of prank calls made to the system.

The current 911 system meets international standards and is able to collect, collate and store a large amount of data. In this regard, I would like to use this space to make a direct appeal to “the President right down” to Minister Ramjattan that this data (and data from across the entire public security sector) be made publicly available to be utilised by researchers. Social science students and teachers from the University of Guyana and further afield can generate quite a lot of academic analysis from this data beyond the mundane.