Public Safety Answering Point

A Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) is a call center responsible for answering telephone calls to an emergency telephone number for police, firefighting, and ambulance services. Trained telephone operators are also usually responsible for dispatching these emergency services. Most PSAPs are now capable of caller location for landline calls, and many can handle mobile phone and VoIP caller locations as well, where the mobile phone or VoIP provider has a handset location system. Some can also use voice broadcasting, where outgoing voice mail can be sent to many phone numbers at once, in order to alert people to a local emergency such as a chemical spill.