How to contact local police during 9-1-1 outages

Law enforcement shared some resources with 25 News , like Text 9-1-1, and why it can be important to dial police non-emergency phone lines.

• The non-emergency line for Robinson police is (254)-662-0525.
• If you can't call, you can text 9-1-1.

BROADCAST SCRIPT:

Robinson police found out their 9-1-1 cell service was down Tuesday morning — they didn't receive 9-1-1 calls for about an hour.

Police say this rarely happens, but there are systems to roll calls over to another department in the neighborhood.

What should you do if 9-1-1 isn't working? 25 News reporter Kadence MaKenna asked the Robinson Assistant Police Chief to find out.

"The best thing you can do is in your contacts, save the non-emergency line of every local police department in your phone," Larry Adams said.

"Those rarely go down, that's a landline, and it's a backup way of calling 9-1-1 so you can call that number directly and reach the same dispatcher that's going to answer your 9-1-1 call."

The non-emergency line for Robinson police is (254)-662-0525.

If you can't call, you can text 9-1-1.

"If you're experiencing an issue where you can't get through on a call to 9-1-1, you can always try to text 9-1-1," Adams said.

"That goes to the same 9-1-1 dispatcher as well, and they will be able to respond to your text via text."

Keep in mind though, the text service could go down too — which happened in Waco over the weekend due to maintenance.

25 News reached out to Waco police, and they say the service was down from Friday afternoon to Tuesday evening — they encouraged people to call 9-1-1 in case of an emergency.