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Welcome to TiPS: Today in Public Safety!
Stay informed. Stay prepared. Stay connected.
TiPS: Today in Public Safety delivers the latest insights in Next Generation 911 (NG911) and public safety technology, helping you navigate the innovations transforming emergency response.
Hosted by Mark J. Fletcher, ENP (“Fletch”), a leading expert with 14 U.S. patents, each episode dives into real-world trends in NG911 implementation, interoperability, cybersecurity, and emergency communications strategy.
Published every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 8AM Eastern, the show brings you nearly 200 episodes of sharp, relevant, and forward-looking discussions designed for today’s public safety professionals.
Subscribe now at http://911TiPS.com for the updates that matter most in Public Safety communications.
(Ver.26-NOV25)
Episodes
Wednesday Nov 26, 2025
Wednesday Nov 26, 2025
“95% Certain… BUT 100% Wrong: The Confidence Score Problem”
What if your mapping screen showed a 95% confidence location for a 9-1-1 caller…
…but the caller wasn’t actually in that building…
or on that block…
or even on the right floor?
Welcome to today’s episode of TiPS: Today in Public Safety, where we dig into the surprisingly misunderstood realm of geo-confidence scores — the tiny percentages hidden behind every wireless 9-1-1 location fix that can quietly (and sometimes catastrophically) influence the decisions your ECC makes in seconds.
For years, the public safety industry has celebrated improvements in accuracy: better GPS, more towers, device-based hybrid location, Wi-Fi RTT, barometric Z-axis, and more. But behind all those numbers lives one crucial metric that rarely gets explained clearly:
👉 Confidence.
And here’s the uncomfortable truth:
A 95% confidence score is not a guarantee.
It’s not even a confirmation.
It’s a probability — a test-lab probability — and when the real world shows up, those probabilities can drift, skew, or break entirely.
In this episode, we break down:
🛰️ 1. What a Confidence Score Really Means
Spoiler: It’s based on controlled testing in environments that do not include your downtown skyscrapers, RF hellscapes, old dorm buildings, or abandoned malls where wireless signals go to die.
📏 2. Why “95%” Can Still Be Wrong
An 8.7-meter uncertainty may sound tiny, but vertically it can represent three floors, and horizontally, several apartments. That’s a lot of doors for responders to knock on.
🌆 3. Why the Same Score Behaves Differently in Different Places
RF chaos. Multipath distortion. Construction interference. Carrier algorithm differences. Environmental quirks. Your confidence score might be perfect in one city and garbage in another.
🚒 4. What ECCs Actually Need: Operational Certainty
REMEMBER : NEW EPISODES are published each week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning - usually around 8AM on"Fletch's LinkedIn page [ https://www.linkedin.com/in/fletch911/ ]For Fletch's Blogs, see his Wordpress Site at [ http://Fletch.TV ]
and you can follow him on Social Media (such as X) @Fletch911
For NG911 Consulting Services - you can reach Fletch through Fletch 911, LLC at http://Fletch911.com
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