Earlier this spring, Fort Worth PD received a call reporting that someone with a weapon had discharged that weapon at the caller. As he began to dispatch field responders, Telecommunicator Colton Warren leveraged Prepared’s AI-powered call transcription and call insights to examine the facts of the situation he’d be sending officers to face.
He quickly discovered that it wasn’t what it seemed to be.
Note: quotes have been lightly edited for clarity
“That night, we were relatively busy,” Colton says, “The call came in as a person with a weapon and the complainant was advising that the subject on scene had been displaying a firearm and shooting at him.”
As he examined the transcript, with officers actively en route, Prepared’s instant updates were critical to inform officers of a key detail: there was no weapon yet involved.
“Throughout the progress of the progression of the call, we’re reviewing the notes on Prepared versus what had from the call-taker’s initial call sheet and we were able to see from the transcription that he was now advising she has not shot at me, she actually doesn't have a firearm, it's actually my firearm, and it's currently locked and secured inside of the apartment.”
The reality? The complainant was returning to retrieve personal items, potentially including his firearm, that were inside the apartment…but he didn’t admit this until after the call had been passed from call-taker to dispatcher and the preliminary call sheet had been passed on.
“If there was no threats or false reports made, it would have been a simple call of him trying to retrieve his items from the apartment.”
Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case, and officers were going to be stepping into a potentially tense situation.
“The complainant in this case was under an EPO with the subject [at] the apartment he was at, so he had violated the EPO…it could have escalated very, very badly, especially if the victim inside the apartment was upset the officers were there…It could easily turn into an unfortunate event.”
Instead, they arrived aware that no weapon was yet involved and that the situation was calmer than initially reported.
“Once they made scene, we were able to try to guarantee safety not just for officers, but also guarantee safety for the victim that the complainant was making false reports on, considering that there was never a firearm involved.”
After this success, and multiple others, Colton raves about Prepared:
“It's a platform I'd highly recommend just in our own department. I'm documenting all these major incidents that were either prevented or that were given clarification to officers and to greater increase the citizen safety. We're trying to build every use case we can…I'd recommend it to basically anyone that could use this to benefit their officers and their citizens.”
“It's saving time, whenever you're trying to coordinate, you don't have to call people back at 3AM and wake him, get him out of bed if there's no need to when you’re just trying to verify their gate code. Instead, we can pull that from Prepared. That's saving time when we could have other major incidents going on where we need to call people for really, really important reasons.”
“It's very much a tool where it's going to give you a net, where if you miss a detail or you know they're mumbling, but the system picks it up, you don't have to go back and ask the same question three times to get the answer.”
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Thank you, Colton, for everything you do for your community and for your support & use of Prepared! Bring Prepared to your agency.
