Citrus County Sheriff's Office using AI to help screen calls, save time for emergencies

LECANTO, Fla. — A new piece of technology is helping emergency call dispatchers in Citrus County.

Artificial intelligence is now being used to screen 911 calls at the Citrus County Emergency Operations Center, freeing up dispatchers to focus on people who need immediate help. But the new technology is also raising some concerns.

“If (there are) any calls that come in that could potentially have an emergency response, we go ahead and answer those calls,” says Pontius.

But now dispatchers have some extra help from artificial intelligence.

“It creates an AI operator to help us with our non-emergency calls to really kind of take that workload off of our 911 call takers,” said Sheriff David Vincent. “So we can always focus on those emergency calls.”

Vincent says the goal isn’t to replace dispatchers but to free them up to focus on emergencies.

“When you think about that workload, when a 911 operator has to manage a 911 phone line and also a non-emergency line, we thought that this was a very effective way to handle those non-emergency calls so that we could focus on those 911 calls,” he said.

But not everyone is sold on the idea.

After the sheriff’s office announced the technology on Facebook, some residents expressed concerns. With AI becoming more common in the workplace, experts say those concerns deserve attention, especially with its growing popularity.

“More and more people are adopting AI for personal and professional use. And more and more organizations are also doing the same,” said Dr. Karni Chagal-Feferkorn, an assistant professor and AI expert at the University of South Florida’s Bellini College of Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity and Computing.

She says one of the top concerns is whether AI will be used to replace the people specifically trained for certain jobs.

“Here it’s a very specific skill of interacting with people — calling and prioritizing their call and addressing it,” she said. “But hopefully wherever it’s deployed, these systems, still they’re thinking about how to make sure that at least some of the workers or some of the police officers know how to handle such calls for a future where maybe we do not have these systems available.”

Vincent says he understands the concerns but emphasizes that residents can still speak with a person.

“If you want to talk to a human, you can always say that if you’re with the AI operator. And then, if you have a true emergency, you’re always going to get a human on 911,” Vincent said. “We’re here, watching the calls real time as they happen. There’s always a human behind that call. So let this process ride, and I think they’ll be pleasantly surprised.”

For dispatchers like Pontius, it’s another tool to help manage the calls coming in while keeping their attention on the emergencies that need them the most.

Sheriff Vincent says the emergency operations center receives on average about 5,000 calls a week. So far, the AI system has handled about 60% of the agency’s non-emergency calls.

Citrus County Sheriff's Office using AI to help screen calls, save time for emergencies

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