With the applications of Internet of Things (IoT) for smart cities, the real-time performance for a large number of network packets is facing serious challenge. Thus, how to improve the emergency response has become a critical issue. However, traditional packet scheduling algorithms cannot meet the requirements of the large-scale IoT system for smart cities. To address this shortcoming, this paper proposes EARS, an efficient data-emergency-aware packet scheduling scheme for smart cities. EARS describes the packet emergency information with the packet priority and deadline. Each source node informs the destination node of the packet emergency information before sending the packets. The destination node determines the packet scheduling sequence and processing sequence according to emergency information. Moreover, this paper compares EARS with a first-come, first-served, multilevel queue algorithm and a dynamic multilevel priority packet scheduling algorithm. Simulation results show that EARS outperforms these previous scheduling algorithms in terms of packet loss rate, average packet waiting time, and average packet end-to-end delay.