Harry Reid: “Today I told the senior Senator from Illinois about the visit I had yesterday with people from Nevada. The woman I…”

“Today I told the senior Senator from Illinois about the visit I had yesterday with people from Nevada. The woman I remember so clearly works for the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. She has worked there for 27 years. For the last 20 years, she has been the person in charge of the 9-1-1 center. Is the Senator aware that she, like many people who work in these entities around the country--and, of course, in a State of 35 million people, I am sure California has a number of them--she told me that in Las Vegas, this big sprawling urban center we now have, that when someone calls 9-1-1 from a telephone, such as we see on the desk in the corner or such as we have in the cloakroom or the Senator has in her home, they know where that phone call comes from. They know the address, they know the location, but now when people use computers for doing their telephoning in a way that is hard for me to understand, but I am beginning to understand it better, and cell phones, they have no idea where their emergency calls come from. People have died around the country as a result of a call coming into the 911 center, and they do not know where it is coming from. Does the Senator realize that can all be cured with money? The technology is here to correct that, but we do not have money to give the State and local governments to correct that one thing to make homeland security and security generally more satisfactory. Is the Senator aware of that?”