Paul Bass Photo
The perception of New Haven’s 911 call center is just that, a perception, said director Michael Briscoe.
Briscoe (pictured) brought that message to City Hall for a meeting with Beaver Hills and Westville alders concerned about response times and what appears to be a disconnect between dispatch and the police department.
Alders Adam Marchand, Brian Wingate, Richard Furlow and Darryl Brackeen have been fielding complaints from residents in their wards about calls to 911 where people have felt their concerns were not taken seriously, help never came, or did so long after the danger had passed. Confrontations featuring yelling, including Briscoe and the fire chief, have recently been overheard at 1 Union Ave., where Briscoe’s center is housed. The handling of this 911 call about a Yale student who eventually jumped to his death from the Taft apartment building also raised questions about the center’s performance.
PSAP [Public Service Answering Point, or PSAP ] director Briscoe came to the City Hall meeting Tuesday meeting armed with stats showing that not only had 911 call takers and dispatchers fielded more than 20,000 calls during the first 21 days of September, there was not one delay in handling those calls. He acknowledged that there is room for improvement in the communications department, but also with how the department, police, fire and EMS work together.
“It is a necessary function of public safety,” Briscoe said of the communications department. “You can’t have public safety without communication.”
From residents who call in emergencies to the non-emergency line to a question of whether there are enough cops to respond to a call, Briscoe told alders that “sometimes it is really hard to put a dispatch together.” But he said he’s not interested in blame. He said he’s interested in a resolution.
He said over the summer, the communication’s department has worked with the police department to make a number of adjustments to how robbery and burglary calls are prioritized. They are now automatically categorized as a “priority two” call, and cops know that they are to respond as soon as someone is available. For priority one calls, such as a shooting, stabbing, or a burglary that has been upgrade to a priority one, the average response and dispatch times from the 911 center are between six and seven minutes. The best time was five minutes and 59 seconds, Briscoe said. The worst time is seven minutes.
Briscoe pointed out that response times on the 911-side have improved over the last five years, but the availability of officers to respond to a call remains a problem.
“Whether it’s due to staffing, or whether it’s due to being already dispatched on a call, you name it, with no one to dispatch to, it is hard to send a response,” he said. “Like every other department we can use an up in staffing, in the police department and in our department. The long and short of it, is that if there is no one available it’s hard to send someone.”
Top Westville/West Hills cop Sgt. Renee Dominguez said that if a call is priority one, two cops are going to respond, and that can make responding to additional calls coming in difficult. Time of day can almost make responding difficult, she said.
For instance, in Westville, two officers usually work the midnight shift. If an alarm, or domestic violence dispute happens and those two officers respond, they can’t respond to another call. That means other officers have to be pulled from other districts. But if those officers are also busy on calls, that can delay the ability of officers to get to a call in what might seem like a reasonable amount of time to the person calling.
A Call From Lawncrest
The 911 center and police had a test this summer of that process when a longtime Lawncrest Road homeowner called about her home being burglarized. The call came into the communications center at 1:44 p.m. The call was dispatched to officers at 2:35 p.m., according to information provided by the police department. Four minutes after the cops got the call, they were in the resident’s driveway talking to her.
Public Safety Communications Deputy Director George Peet said an extensive review of this particular call revealed that the initial call came in to the non-emergency number, not 911.
“The first thing a call taker is trained in is how to answer a call and to use so-called active listening,” said Peet, a 20-year veteran of the communications center. He said that means the call taker is listening to what the caller is saying but also listening to what’s happening in the background. He listened to the recordings and he said the caller “was very passive. There was no urgency in her voice.”
Based on that active-listening process, the call taker created a narrative that indicated that the woman was concerned that her house had been burglarized in the short time that she’d been away, she was by herself, didn’t want to go back into her home alone, and wanted police officers to come before she went back inside.
Peet said a supervisor reviewed the narrative and out of concern, within 12 minutes, called the homeowner back to confirm that she was safe and to also ask if she saw anyone lurking around. Though the homeowner indicated that she didn’t see anyone, the supervisor bumped the call up to a priority one so that officers would know to respond as soon as someone was available. It just so happened that officers weren’t available until they got out of line up that day.
“The district in which she lived, the officers were already tied up on another call … The number of officers [also] is slim,” he said of upper Westville’s Beverly Hills area, a neighborhood known for its relative safety. “[Responding] would have involved pulling in officers from other districts, and those districts were also busy at the time.”
Questions Remain
But alders were still struggling to understand the disconnect and why response times for the center could be so quick on paper, but seemingly less so when it comes to police officers showing up at the call.
Beaver Hills Alder Brian Wingate said he lives on Ella T. Grasso Boulevard and “those response times just don’t exist in my world.”
Amity/Beverly Hills Alder Richard Furlow said a few years ago, he called 911 about a burglary that was in progress at the house next door to his. “I told them, ‘They are breaking into the house right now. I’m looking out of my window.’ They asked, ‘Can you see them?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ No one came,” he said. Furlow said he called back a few hours later to say that the burglars were gone. He was told that the call had not been dispatched. “From what I’m told the police have no idea what’s going on until a call is actually sent.”
Though most officers can’t see a call when it first comes in, Briscoe said, once it is in the system select officers can see it and send officers. While every police unit does not have access to the dispatch system, district managers and shift supervisors do, he said.
“They can see the same things the dispatcher sees,” he said. “There are times where an officer sees a call holding and makes themselves available, or says ‘Why is that call holding?’ It’s a system that should work and hold each other accountable.”
In an effort to push more calls to officers, faster, he is currently prompting his supervisors to use the radio to contact police supervisors, district managers and command staff when there appears to be no officers available and calls are holding for response. “We want them to utilize their expertise to triage the call and find units to send because, I, like every other constituent have an expectation of public safety that when a call comes in a cop goes out. I don’t want to wait,” Briscoe said.
City Chief Administrative Officer Michael Carter said Mayor Toni Harp has tasked him, Briscoe, and command staff at the police department with developing a brochure and possibly a video about when to call 911, and how to interact with call takers. Briscoe said he also is working on more training for dispatchers to improve customer service.
“Our staff responds to more calls in one day than a responder might respond to in a quarter of a year,” he said. “But 99.9 percent accuracy is not good enough. We’re not on scene but we should be providing the utmost level of reassurance to the public. Reassurance is the bare minimum of service we should be providing.”