Picture a nurse getting home from a twelve-hour night shift in Boulder, Colorado. She finds her bike missing from the rack outside her apartment. The thief is long gone. Normally she would dial the police non-emergency line and wait on hold. Starting this month, Boulder’s AI dispatcher answers instead, any hour of the day.
The assistant is called ANET, short for Automated Non-Emergency Triage. GovTech first reported the rollout. Axon built it. It speaks English and Spanish around the clock, and it will not answer 911. It answers everything else: abandoned cars, noise complaints, lost pets, fireworks, parking disputes, and theft reports filed after the person responsible is already gone.
The Boulder AI Dispatcher’s Real Job
Boulder police say about 70 percent of the calls their communications center takes are not emergencies at all. Every minute spent logging a noise complaint is a minute a dispatcher cannot spend on a fire, a crash, or someone in danger. That math matters. Dispatcher availability during a true emergency can mean help arriving in two minutes instead of five.
Boulder Police Chief Steve Redfearn says the change gives his staff “more time to focus on calls involving more serious threats of harm and violence.”
Boulder is not guessing blindly here. Colorado Springs launched a similar Axon assistant, nicknamed SARAH, on its non-emergency line in September. The early results offer a preview.
| Colorado Springs, before SARAH | Colorado Springs, after SARAH |
|---|---|
| Non-emergency callers waited 30+ seconds on hold | Non-emergency wait time is close to zero |
That contract costs about $170,000 a year, roughly 34 cents per resident in a city that size. For that price, dispatchers stop drowning in routine calls, and people with real emergencies get picked up faster.
What This Actually Saves You
For the nurse with the stolen bike, that gap is the whole story. No more holding for half a minute or longer. No more driving to a station that is closed for the night. She can report the theft from her phone in under two minutes and get a case number before she is back inside.
Language access matters too. Picture a grandfather in Boulder watching his grandkids while fireworks rattle the windows late at night. If English is not his first language, he is used to waiting for a bilingual staff member. ANET takes the call in Spanish. No transfer, no wait, no guessing.
What I Would Watch For Next
I am not going to pretend this is a finished success story. Boulder has not published its numbers yet, and full rollout waits until the end of November. Systems like this live or die on how well they catch a routine call that turns dangerous mid-conversation. Boulder says ANET listens for danger signs, like injuries, weapons, or distress, and hands off immediately, with a dispatcher able to join any call. That is the right design on paper. Whether it holds up under real call volume is the part worth watching.
Boulder’s own page for the project spells out which calls ANET handles and how to reach a human instead. Other cities are chasing the same goal. I have covered Poughkeepsie’s pothole app and Broward County’s digital front door for the same reason. Local government is getting faster, and that saves residents time.
If you live in Boulder, check bouldercolorado.gov’s ANET page before the end of November for rollout dates. If you live somewhere else, ask your city council one question: how much dispatcher time goes to calls that are not emergencies? The answer might explain why your last 911 call took longer to pick up than it should have.