“95% Certain… BUT 100% Wrong: The Confidence Score Problem”

What if your mapping screen showed a 95% confidence location for a 9-1-1 caller…

…but the caller wasn’t actually in that building…

or on that block…

or even on the right floor?

Welcome to today’s episode of TiPS: Today in Public Safety, where we dig into the surprisingly misunderstood realm of geo-confidence scores — the tiny percentages hidden behind every wireless 9-1-1 location fix that can quietly (and sometimes catastrophically) influence the decisions your ECC makes in seconds.

For years, the public safety industry has celebrated improvements in accuracy: better GPS, more towers, device-based hybrid location, Wi-Fi RTT, barometric Z-axis, and more. But behind all those numbers lives one crucial metric that rarely gets explained clearly:

👉 Confidence.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth:

A 95% confidence score is not a guarantee.

It’s not even a confirmation.

It’s a probability — a test-lab probability — and when the real world shows up, those probabilities can drift, skew, or break entirely.

In this episode, we break down:

Spoiler: It’s based on controlled testing in environments that do not include your downtown skyscrapers, RF hellscapes, old dorm buildings, or abandoned malls where wireless signals go to die.

An 8.7-meter uncertainty may sound tiny, but vertically it can represent three floors, and horizontally, several apartments. That’s a lot of doors for responders to knock on.

RF chaos. Multipath distortion. Construction interference. Carrier algorithm differences. Environmental quirks. Your confidence score might be perfect in one city and garbage in another.