A witness called 911 to report an assault on the Green. The dispatcher texted back a link to a new app, enabling the witness to live-stream video of the attack and provide more details for first responders.
That happened recently thanks to an experiment taking place in New Haven.
The city’s 911 center is beta-testing a new app developed by a company led by a 23-year-old who was paid $100,000 to drop out of Yale in order to try to revolutionize emergency communications, to bring 911 into the 21st century.
New Haven’s public schools are also rolling out a test of the new app, as have 200 other districts across the country.
The app is called Prepared. Michael Chime, the company’s CEO, developed it along with two then-Yale classmates. Their company recently landed $2.1 million in venture capital financing. It’s currently operating out of a Prospect Street apartment, with eight local and remote workers.
In 2012, Chime’s school in Chardon, Ohio, a blue-collar town outside Cleveland, went into lockdown because of a mass shooter in the next town.
“I had parents texting me. I had sisters texting me. Because it was on the news before the school found out,” Chime recalled during an interview on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program. (Watch the full interview in the above video.)
Soni and Gleicher were in school in Westport at the time of the Sandy Hook massacre.
“We thought that this was our generation’s issue. You have conversations with any adult, and this is something they didn’t go through in school,” Chime said.
He and his friends began working on the app in 2018. The idea was born one night during a bull session in Yale’s Grace Hopper residential college. Chime, a political science major who played defensive tackle on the Bulldogs football squad, and Gleicher were discussing the biggest challenges facing their generation. They threw around ideas about developing new technology to deal with school security.
They drew up a proposal and entered it in an annual pitch competition called Startup Yale. The undergraduate team faced off against MBA graduate students for the competition’s Miller Prize — and won.
That brought them $25,000, entrance into the tech start-up Tsai Center’s accelerator, and help from faculty members and alumni.
As they looked into the idea further, they learned that it took three and a half minutes for officials at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland, Florida, to learn about the presence of an active shooter in 2018 and put the school into lockdown, Chime said. At Sandy Hook, people on school grounds had no way to forward information quickly that a troubled former student had returned and trouble was brewing. Chime and his colleagues realized that most schools were relying on a limited number of people using walkie-talkies and a public-address system to convey information.
Their app enables teachers throughout a school, administrators, security staffers, and students to immediately report and share information about an emergency within 15 seconds. A principal can quickly check if information from, say, a teacher about a gunman roaming halls is corroborated by others. Participants click on the app’s icons (one for a fire, for instance; another for an active shooter) on their phones or laptops or desktops. More information can flow in faster from more people to more people, and flow back out. Like a lockdown order.
To save lives in a crisis, Chime noted, “it is vitally important to get the right information to the right people quickly.”
Here in New Haven they met in person with school and other city officials, who were impressed with both the idea and the tenacity of the pitchers.
The city school system signed a $67,500 contract last October to experiment with the app for a year. “The app enables users to reach the police on an emergency basis from their computers. It is designed for use when telephone contact may be impractical, as in cases of an active shooter or where telephones are down,” reported schools spokesperson Justin Harmon. “The app provides the police with data on the location of the caller, as well as any information provided by the user on the situation at hand.”
The Covid-19 school shutdown delayed the NHPS roll-out; it will begin in full this academic year, according to Thaddeus Reddish, the Board of Education’s security chief. Reddish said teachers can opt in to obtaining the app, and will be receiving training. Reddish said he likes the way the app enables information to move faster, as well as a feature that directs crisis information directly to the police and fire departments.
Meanwhile, CEO Chime’s team at Prepared has broadened the concept to other forms of public emergency management. They discovered that 911 dispatch centers still operate on the assumption that people are calling from dial-up phones. In fact, most calls come from cell phones.
“911 is a space that hasn’t changed in 50 years,” Chime said. “We have a path to doing that.”
Chime’s team built software to interact with 911 centers, and found New Haven’s PSAP (public service answering point) up for a beta test.
In New Haven, 85 percent of the 125,000-130,000 annual 911 calls come from cell phones, according to city emergency management chief Rick Fontana.
Fontana expressed optimism about the app’s potential to transform emergency communications. He compared it to another New Haven-born crisis communication app, Veoci, that now connects city and utility crews with instant updates during major storms. Now the staff at the city’s Emergency Operations Center “can’t live without” Veoci, Fontana said.
“These are college kids! It’s amazing how brilliant they are, coming up with this,” Fontana said of the Prepared team. “Born in New Haven! Good stuff.”
The PSAP staff has been using the app two or three times on average every eight-hour shift, reported Communications Supervisor Cathy Sargent.
The app enables dispatchers to hone in more precisely on the location of a call or incident, because the app produces more exact coordinates than the standard 1,000-foot approximation offered through GPS, she said.
In some cases, like the Green assault call, dispatchers have also been texting the link to the app to callers in order for them to live-stream video. In some cases that has enabled dispatchers to make an assessment of the extent of damage in car crashes, for instance. Firefighters and cops are also getting better information faster through the app.
Sargent added that the staff reassures callers that the app’s privacy protections prevent anyone from gaining access to their phone or bombarding them with unsolicited pitches.
“I love this,” Sargent said of the app. “Once we’re out of beta testing, I believe this is going to revolutionize dispatching.”
Staff at a 911 call center in Nye County, outside Las Vegas in Nevada, saved a life with the help of the app, according to Chime: A caller was having trouble performing CPR. The dispatcher sent the link. The caller turned on the video, and the dispatcher coached them through the process.
As the business got going, Chime decided to take time off school to develop Prepared. Then the pandemic hit. Yale classes moved to Zoom. Chime decided to apply fora fellowship, funded by Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, that offers students $100,000 over two years to ditch college and work full time to “work on ideas that change the world.”
Twenty people a year win Thiel fellowships. The process is as competitive as gaining acceptance to an Ivy League school.
The hardest part for Chime, perhaps, came when a camera crew from the Thiel team traveled to Ohio to interview his parents as part of the application-vetting process. Chime was at home for the summer at the time.
He hadn’t yet told his parents what exactly he was applying for. He was scared of their reactions: His parents had never finished college. They were pumped about their son graduating from Yale. He figured he probably wouldn’t get the fellowship, so he chickened out on fully warning his parents.
“The very first question to my dad: ‘Well, what do you think about Michael dropping out?’
“I’m sitting right next to him. My mom eyes him down. My dad goes, ‘I’m devastated.”
After the crew left, Chime’s parents did some research about the fellowship. They came around to the idea. Or at least became more supportive.
Then came the rocket-like take-off of Prepared. Chime said the company plans to branch out further to applications to help hospitals, houses of worship, and other institutions that deal with emergencies.
And, he said, he just might at some point return to college.