TiPS Episode 26 0304 Implementing ASAP in Anoka County MN

In this 4th video of this Special ASAP series podcast, Fletch sits down with Kari Morrissey Anoka County Emergency Communications Director in Minnesota for a real-world, no-fluff conversation about what “better 9-1-1” looks like when the rubber meets the road.

Kari walks through the scale of their operation, a modern center serving about 380,000 residents, dispatching for 11 law agencies and 15 fire departments, and handling roughly 250,000 law calls for service plus about 45,000 fire calls annually.  She also shares what it is like running a 44-seat center with cross-trained staff rotating through positions daily. 

Kari dives into her ASAP implementation with Fletch, including the unglamorous but critical early work of cleaning up bad address data and helping call takers adjust from “one sentence alarm calls” to richer, structured alarm data.  The turning point? The first big storm, when alarm calls flooded in but DID NOT tie up call takers, because they arrived directly in the pending queue, letting the team prioritize true emergencies. 

Kari also explains why ASAP is a game-changer for efficiency: cancellations, keyholder updates, and comments arrive automatically with dashboard notifications, cutting out the extra phone calls and saving minutes across the workflow.  She ties that time savings back to what matters most: giving telecommunicators more breathing room and more time to deliver better service on the calls that truly need it. 

Finally, Kari looks ahead: richer data, indoor maps, and even controlled camera access as future “ASAP-adjacent” possibilities, plus her big wish list item, true PSAP-to-PSAP interoperability that lets centers share status, overflow conditions, and incident visibility across borders in real time.   

 

If you are a PSAP leader, a CAD decision-maker, an alarm industry partner, or just someone who likes hearing how technology actually plays out on the floor, this one is packed with practical lessons and a few very honest laughs along the way. 

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