[Ecrit] Service URNs for specialized law enforcement and similar services

[Henning Schulzrinne <[e-mail]>]

We discussed at length today how to provide URNs for direct access to specialized first responder services. Here are some observations:

(1) While there are some generic descriptions, such as "sheriff" or "transit police", there are numerous variations by issues handled (e.g., "special victims unit", "SWAT team", "US Postal Inspector") and geography ("county police", "state police", "university campus police", "park police", "military police"). There are no clear boundaries in some cases between types of emergency handled and geography. For example, the US Postal Inspector isn't restricted to US post offices and deals with a wide variety of crimes, from mail fraud to mailing ricin. The FCC enforcement bureau has badges and enforces, among other things, antenna safety violations anywhere in the US.

Geography often overlaps - the NJ Transit and Amtrak police both deal with the North East Corridor and Penn Station.

(2) Something we did not discuss: People often need to access "out of area" services. For example, I might want to contact transit police after I leave the train, e.g., if I saw something suspicious, want to ask about a lost item or need to follow up on an earlier issue. In particular, it must be possible to reach NJ state police even if I'm just across the border in NY and I need to be able to reach the Amtrak police when I'm on NJ Transit. This is obviously trivial with using numbers, but it would be really confusing to be connected to NJ state police if I just talked to the NY version.

(3) We also didn't really discuss why we need a URN to begin with. I see three reasons:

(a) Automated location disclosure [and location-based routing] - you can disclose location if it's below 'sos', but not with some random number. That's both good and bad, as it is not clear that location and identity disclosure are always desirable for these services. The legal status is also different.

(b) Automated discovery - I should be able to discover all emergency services that are applicable to my area, as that's really painful right now. At least in the US, numbers for these services are not widely known (every sheriff's department has their own and so does every transit police department).

(c) Fall back - you can fall back to a generic emergency service if that service doesn't handle the local area. However, that's not always appropriate. If I'm *not* on the Columbia campus and call the Columbia University police number about a lost item, I don't want to be connected to 911.

(4) Unlike 911, these numbers are often used for emergencies and "business" non-emergency issues, such as reporting a crime that took place in the past rather than just crimes in progress.

I'll follow up with some opinions, but I hope this is reasonably non-controversial.

Henning