The San Diego County Sheriff's Office (SDSO) serves a county of approximately 3,600 square miles and a population of over one million. The office is led by Communications Coordinator Jeff Hebert, who worked in the PSAP for 30 years and handles approximately 350,000 non-emergency calls per year while operating 24/7/365. SDSO's scope extends beyond traditional law enforcement to include detention facilities, civil service processes, restraining orders and warrants.
Like many agencies, SDSO was struggling with recruiting, training and retention. The agency has a robust IT team and routinely evaluates technology to improve efficiency. For two years, they pursued a strategy of using technology to triage non-emergency calls, including experimenting with remote call takers (dispatchers answering non-emergency calls from home) and a third party-based keyword automation system.
Unfortunately, the keyword system didn't measure up. It relied on rigid matching, misclassified calls (for example, the prior system would interpret "fireworks" as a "fire”), and generated staff frustration. Traditional call trees weren't working either.
SDSO also had a visibility problem. Leadership had no clear picture of what was actually coming in on the non-emergency line. Calls that didn't result in a CAD incident were invisible in their data.
Finally, SDSO was faced with a common and costly pattern around jurisdiction overlap: SDSO serves the unincorporated county, but callers frequently reached them when they intended to call the San Diego Police Office or one of 18 other city offices. Callers would wait on hold for 20 minutes only to be told they called the wrong agency.
SDSO replaced the previous system with Motorola Solutions’ Non-Emergency Call Agent. Where the prior implementation had taken two years, the new solution deployed in five weeks. The pilot launched in late fall 2025, and the system went live 24/7 in February 2026.
The Agent serves two purposes for SDSO. First, it acts as a routing tool. Based on what the caller describes, the Agent determines whether the call should go to a remote dispatcher, the main communication center, or can be resolved without a human.
Second, it acts as a diversion tool. Calls that never needed to reach a dispatcher in the first place (wrong-agency calls, jail custody inquiries, information requests) are handled end-to-end by the Agent.
Regarding wrong-agency calls specifically, when the Agent determines the incident occurred in San Diego city or another jurisdiction, it provides the correct contact information and can text it to the caller. This alone reduces the calls reaching dispatchers.
As Communications Coordinator Jeff Hebert described it: "Once we implemented the Agent, we saw the actual calls coming in. That's how I found out that jail inquiries are one of our highest call volumes. I didn't have visibility into that before." He adds, “Everyone on the [Motorola Solutions] deployment team wanted to be helpful; it felt like a collaboration.”
SDSO's deflection rate was achieved through a structured optimization cycle: systematically identifying call types that were being transferred unnecessarily, configuring new SOPs to handle them and verifying the impact in production data.