(Updated) When a 911 call came in reporting child abuse in progress, the dispatcher seems to have made a crucial error that allowed the call to slip through the cracks.
City spokesman Adam Joseph said Tuesday night that the city’s Public Safety Department is looking into the 911 dispatch center’s handling of an emergency call from last Thursday, Feb. 17.
Here’s what he said happened:
A woman called to report that she had seen a child being beaten inside a car in New Haven. The dispatcher processed the call, but seems to have assigned the wrong code to it, so that police didn’t realize that the incident was still in progress.
When the woman did not get an immediate response to her call, she complained to police. Cops notified the Public Safety Department, who looked up the coding and realized there may have been an error.
The Public Safety Department, the civilian department that fields emergency calls, is investigating what went wrong, Joseph said.
“The employee will be retrained in that area and could face disciplinary action at the conclusion of the investigation,” he said.
The woman who reported the alleged abuse gave police a plate number for the car she saw, but it didn’t come up in the system, Joseph said.
On Wednesday, police spokesman Officer Joe Avery put out a press release asking for help finding the man who had allegedly been abusing the child. Avery also offered further details about the incident.
Here’s what he said happened:
At around 2:08 p.m. on Feb. 17, the woman saw the abuse at the corner of Congress and Vernon streets in the Hill. A man was assaulting a child in the back of a vehicle on the side of the road. The vehicle, an older model SUV, then drove away.
The woman reported the plate number as CT 471 FPB. But the DMV has no record of such a plate.
The alleged abuser is described as a white or Hispanic male between 30 and 40 years old, thin build, dark hair, about 5’7” tall.
Police are asking anyone who saw the incident or sees the SUV to contact the department at 203 – 946-6316. Anonymous information can be phoned into the Police Tip line at 203 – 946-6296.
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