California’s Antiquated 911 Dispatch Is on the Verge of Going Dark

Gavin Newsom spent more than $450 million on a regional emergency call system that flopped and was canceled—meantime, the old system risks “catastrophic failure.”

California once built massive infrastructure projects—dams, highways, and aqueducts—that were the marvel of the world. During the Great Depression, engineers erected the Golden Gate Bridge in four years, ahead of schedule and under budget. But those days are over. Under Governor Gavin Newsom, California has been unable to complete, and hardly able to begin, construction on its high-speed rail system. Many other government projects are beset by delays, cost overruns, and dreams that never materialize.

Though the bullet train has become the most famous symbol of this dysfunction, Newsom has overseen an even more important system failure: the overhaul of California’s 911 emergency line.

During his first year in office, the governor confidently projected that he would replace the state’s emergency call system within three years, a goal that officials previously estimated would cost $132 million. But nearly seven years later, the state has spent more than $450 million on a regionalized “Next Generation” digital system that suffered such appalling failures and disruptions during its initial rollout that the Newsom administration scrapped it entirely.

Meantime, the old system is hanging on by a thread—and it’s only a matter of time, some believe, before it goes dark.

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For years, California has needed to replace its old analog 911 system with a modern digital system that uses location, text, and video services to identify people in need quickly. Other states, such as Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, have single statewide “Next Gen” systems. But in 2019, after years of planning, the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES) adopted a regional approach, naming four contractors responsible for designing, building, deploying, and operating the new technologies across four regions and a statewide backup provider.

The buildout was glacial. Cal OES and contractors apparently spent months surveying sites and testing software in a lab. The pandemic, which should have deepened the developers’ sense of urgency, “stopped a lot of progress,” according to a Cal OES official. It took more than two years for a single county to activate the technology fully.

By 2022, contractors had launched Next Gen in at least a couple local dispatch centers. The results were disastrous. Dispatchers in Tuolumne County, the first to launch the technology at full capacity, were unable to process calls, identify locations, or immediately see callers’ phone numbers. When they tried to transfer calls, the line on the other end would remain “silent.” A whistleblower claimed that citizens were “losing faith in the 9-1-1 emergency system.”

For good reason: Tuolumne’s emergency system experienced multiple breakdowns. According to an internal document obtained by an NBC affiliate, the county’s network suffered a blackout for some 12 hours straight. In another case, a man who attempted to call 911 five times to report that his garage was on fire couldn’t get through. In yet another, dispatchers could not connect the lines after receiving a “911 call of an active heart attack.”

“Could you imagine making the scariest phone call of your life and thinking no one is coming?” the whistleblower said.

Another county saw similar problems around the time the contractor updated the police department’s phone equipment. In Riverside County, Desert Hot Springs dispatchers reported more than 100 “trouble tickets” between 2023 and 2024, including dropped or abandoned calls, failed callbacks, and bad audio. As an NBC News affiliate reported in a story about 911 rollout failures, one dispatcher told a woman who requested an ambulance for her boyfriend that the call-transfer system was “not working,” causing “a delay in emergency medical aid.”

In 2025, dispatchers from Desert Hot Springs received a call from a woman requesting an ambulance for her stepfather, who had fallen and was unresponsive. According to internal emails we obtained via a public records request and our conversations with a Desert Springs dispatcher, the system logged out multiple dispatchers. Eventually, the system rebooted, and the woman was able to contact the dispatchers, who directed medical services to the home.

Emergency personnel discovered a grim scene. There were “at least 1000 roaches” climbing on the walls, children living in mold-infested rooms, and a man “found on the floor of his bedroom on his back in the supine position.” Firefighters attempted to perform life-saving measures, but the stepfather had died.

One Desert Hot Springs dispatcher, who had firsthand knowledge of the incident and spoke with City Journal on condition of anonymity, blamed updates associated with the Next Gen system and NGA 911, the contractor responsible for managing them. The dispatcher sent a whistleblower complaint to Cal OES, arguing that the system failure might have caused the man’s death. “This is NOT acceptable,” the dispatcher wrote. “People’s lives are on the line and your failed system may have just cost this person [his] life.”

An employee at NGA 911, also speaking on condition of anonymity, disputed the dispatcher’s account, arguing that the router was part of a separate system, that the dispatchers “panicked,” and that the man could have died even if the system had worked as intended. “He didn’t die because of delayed response,” the NGA employee said. “He died because he fell and he smacked his head and he died there on the spot. So, it’s not a result of system failure.”

Cal OES, for its part, insisted that the Desert Hot Springs incident had nothing to do with “the state’s implementation of NG 9-1-1,” and claimed the city’s call center “has not transitioned” to the new system.

Regardless, the failures in Tuolumne and elsewhere were apparently enough for Cal OES officials to pull the plug. After a series of warnings and delays, in November 2025, the Newsom administration officially terminated the regional approach. In a postmortem report, Cal OES indicated that the regional rollout overwhelmed dispatch centers and was ultimately too fragile and risky to work.

In total, California has spent $502 million on Next Gen 911 since 2019—nearly four times more than what the state estimated in 2018–19, about four years after the initial due date, for a system that was built out but never fully activated.

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In the blame game that ensued, the Newsom administration has pointed the finger at the contractors—Atos Public Safety, NGA 911, Synergem Technologies, and Lumen Technologies—and promised to “be actively involved” in the process moving forward. In response, some contractors blamed the state and claimed that the decision to scrap the Next Gen system was a mistake. “It’s going to be hundreds of millions . . . to actually redo what they’ve already built,” said Jeff Schlueter, COO of Synergem Technologies, the firm responsible for the rollout in more than 250 dispatch centers.

For now, Cal OES plans to start from scratch and pursue a statewide, rather than regional, approach, estimating that the new system will take until 2030 to complete. Incredibly, Governor Newsom has encouraged all the current vendors who oversaw the failed system to compete for a bid on the new statewide system, and Cal OES has already decided to extend an interim contract to one, Atos, through 2026—shelling out additional cash to the provider who has already failed to deliver once.

Will this new statewide system work? California’s nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office has strong doubts. In a report published earlier this year, the legislative analyst recommended that the state “pause” all implementation of the program until Cal OES can answer some basic questions, including “What Is the Nature and Scope of the Problem?” and “Will [the] New Plan Solve the Problem?” Nobody believes that the new system will be completed by 2030. “They said that ten years ago,” one dispatcher told us.

Meantime, California is stuck with a 1970s-era emergency call system that is falling apart. The legislative analyst has warned that the legacy system is “in very poor condition and is subject to failure.” And Cal OES is woefully behind on updating other parts of the state’s emergency services. As of this past February, 339 dispatch centers hadn’t undergone maintenance on their call-handling equipment in seven to ten years or more. Some equipment is built with parts not made anymore.

The result: waves of outages that have increased dramatically in recent years. According to the FCC, in 2017, California’s legacy system averaged 17,000 minutes of outages per month. In 2022, that number increased to 59,000 minutes per month. And between October 2022 and June 2024, the legacy system suffered 22,001 hours of outages—about 62,000 minutes per month. Since then, Cal OES has stopped publicizing outage numbers.

These outages have caused serious problems for local communities. Earlier this year, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department 911 system had an overnight outage. Similarly, in 2025, a system crash forced dispatchers to write notes by hand and relay information via radio or phone, rather than with the computer-aided system.

In Oakland, the old system nearly left a police officer dead. In 2019, an off-duty Oakland cop named Danny Chor approached a woman who was vandalizing cars. During the confrontation, the woman stabbed him in the neck. Chor made multiple calls to 911 but could not connect. A nearby truck operator tried to help, but his call also failed. The bystander then called his employer, who was able to connect to the dispatchers directly. First responders brought Chor to the hospital in the back of a patrol car, fearing that he would not survive if they waited for the ambulance.

Since then, the system has teetered on the verge of collapse. A 2023 grand jury report on Oakland’s 911 dispatch system found that, in 2022, nearly half of all callers waited 15 seconds or more for a response. The system managed records with legacy software no longer supported by the vendor; parts had to be purchased on eBay because they were no longer produced; and the vendor had only one technician who could still decipher the software. Oakland, one of the most dangerous cities in the U.S., could experience a total blackout.

“If the proposed hardware and software is perpetually delayed to ‘six months from now,’” the grand jury concluded, “the city risks a catastrophic failure of the system.”

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One might be tempted to view Newsom’s Next Gen 911 rollout as a complete failure—after all, the old system is falling apart and the new system has been “paused.” But as with so many of California’s infrastructure projects, including the “butterfly bridge” and “high-speed rail,” the endless delays and cost overruns produce some hidden winners: the state officials who manage the system and the private companies that secure never-ending contracts.

In the case of Next Gen 911, Newsom employed an army of unionized officials to oversee the work and approved enormous contracts to the four main vendors: $198 million to Atos Public Safety, $108 million to NGA 911, $56 million to Synergem Technologies, and $56 million to CenturyLink (now Lumen Technologies). The state is sure to spend millions more.

Meantime, the losers are always the same: the taxpayers and residents who, in this case, have to keep paying a fee on their monthly phone bill for technology that doesn’t work and keep their fingers crossed that the current system won’t fall apart and send their local dispatchers into a total blackout.

In Los Angeles, where the county sheriff’s department has experienced repeated problems with the system, the stakes are even higher. The Olympics are coming to L.A. in 2028, and city hardware is falling apart. As a systems expert formerly with LAPD told us, it will take a “come-to-Jesus” system failure for the California state government to get serious about its transition to Next Gen 911.

When—not if—that disaster happens, Cal OES will realize: “we’re effed.”

Christopher F. Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of America’s Cultural Revolution. Haley Strack is an investigative reporter at City Journal.