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Council hears plans to expand street teams, emergency management office and 911 automation oversight
Summary
Public safety leaders described an 18-month street-team pilot and a planned expansion; the city is working with PERF on a use-of-force review, building an emergency management office, and deploying automated handling of nonemergency calls with live supervisory QA at the dispatch center.
Craig Morgan, Akron's chief of public safety, and Tony Ingram, a public-safety strategist, briefed council on coordinated public-safety initiatives, including an 18-month street-team pilot, a contracted PERF use-of-force review, and the formation of an emergency management office.
Ingram said the street-team pilot began in January and has partnered with researchers to evaluate outcomes. "So far, it has been nothing but positive," he said; he added that phase 2 aims to expand services and would be negotiated as a contract before council and could cost on the order of several hundred thousand dollars over the next 12 months.
Morgan described citywide emergency management work: creating a comprehensive emergency management plan, an emergency operations center, continuity-of-operations plans for departments, and a public alert system (CodeRED) whose low-priority rollouts will precede broader emergency notifications.
Deputy Chief Makosi reported on the combined communications center: the center handled 335,000 calls in 2025 (163,368 were 911), and it met Ohio answering benchmarks — "95% of 911 calls within 15 seconds and over 97% within 20 seconds," he said. The center added a new digital platform (FRONTLINE) to handle SOPs and training and deployed an automated system for non-emergency lines that handles roughly two-thirds of those calls while supervisors monitor and QA the automated interactions.
Councilmembers asked about oversight of the automated non-emergency system, which Makosi said is monitored in real time and subject to QA reviews. Ingram said the administration received a small ADM board grant (~$40,000) for a "getting to the root" program and is working through contract details with Minority Behavioral Health Group for violence-intervention and related services; a contract for the street-team expansion is expected before June.
