The Bloomberg administration will announce today it is going to change the way it calculates response times to emergency 911 calls, The Post has learned.
Sources said Deputy Mayor Cas Holloway will tell a City Council hearing that the calls are going to be measured from the moment they are placed — not from when dispatchers send help.
The change had been demanded by the Uniformed Firefighters Association, which has been hammering the administration for allegedly fudging the numbers since 2009, when the NYPD took over all emergency-call functions.
Before then, fire calls were handled by both the FDNY and the NYPD.
“This is something we want and the public wants. It gives a complete time of the response to a 911 call for the first time ever,” an administration source told The Post.
Holloway is also expected to announce that city agencies will use the same GPS technology when taking 911 calls to eliminate potential confusion over addresses where responders are sent.
Call-takers are being retrained to change their line of questioning to speed up responses, the sources said.
The changes are likely to help ease long-standing tensions between the administration and the firefighters union.
Still, the sources said Holloway plans to vigorously defend the administration against published reports attacking the new 911 system as filled with life-threatening glitches.
He will say the computerized system put in place in the last month is a success.
“The unions purposely distorted the time between when the police department gets a call and when they request Emergency Medical Services,” a source told The Post. “They did this to suggest that the system failed, but the evidence shows that it didn’t.”
The fight over the new technology heated up after 4-year-old Ariel Russo was killed by an SUV on the Upper West Side on June 4.
Union officials blamed her death on a response delay caused by the technology. Bloomberg has vigorously denied the new system was to blame.