Markeshia Ricks Photo
Neighbors at Wednesday’s management team meeting.
Fearful that a burglar was in her house, Marge Wiener called 911. The cops responded — 45 minutes later.
Forty-five minutes after Wiener’s call. But, it turns out, only four minutes after cops got the message.
Therein lies a tale.
Wiener (at left in photo) told her story to neighbors at this week’s Westville/West Hills community management team meeting, held Wednesday evening at Mauro/Sheridan School. The response time startled those assembled — and sparked an outpouring of tales of other recent break-ins along with questions about police response.
Wiener’s tale also offered a lesson in how communication can break down when citizens seek to alert authorities to a developing crime.
Wiener said she was about to enter her Lawncrest Road house in Upper Westville’s Beverly Hills section one recent afternoon when she noticed that her screen door was ripped.
“My first thought was that the cat had done it because he’s so big,” she said of the rip in the screen. But the cat didn’t do it. The person who broke into her house did.
Still not thinking anything of it, she went in the house. Then she noticed that a back door screen had been tampered with too. In that moment she realized that someone had broken in.
Concerned that the person might still be in her house, she grabbed her cat and high-tailed it out of there. She called 911 to report that her house had been burglarized and the person might still be inside. Forty-five minutes went by before the cops showed.
“The cops that arrived told me that dispatch didn’t send them the information until just before they got there,” she said.
Walking through the neighborhood, she found bits and pieces of her belongings strewn here and there. Wiener said she noticed she was missing a piggy bank that usually holds a bit of loose change, maybe a few dollars. “He got my piggy bank!” she said.
Neighbors posed questions about what appeared to be a delayed response time to a couple of rookie officers who attended Wednesday night’s meeting. They were dismayed when they were told that the shift change that happens between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. likely had something to do with the delay.
Asked Thursday about the delay, police spokesman Officer Dave Hartman said unfortunately that was a bit of misinformation. Shift changes are designed to overlap so that there isn’t this big block of time where nobody is available to respond to calls.
As for the response to Wiener’s call, he said it came into the communications center at 1:44 p.m. The call was dispatched to officers at 2:35 p.m. Four minutes after the cops got the call, they were in Wiener’s driveway talking to her.
The delay wasn’t in police arrival. It was in the message traveling from the 911 dispatcher to the cops.
Hartman said that a report from dispatch indicated that Wiener had told the dispatchers that she’d arrived home to find her screen door busted in. She told the dispatcher that her back door screen was also out, and that she was afraid to go in the house. She wanted an officer to respond.
“There was no indication that there might have been a burglar still on the premises,” Hartman said of the dispatch report. Wiener not explicitly saying that there was a burglar in her home likely lowered the priority of the call for the dispatcher.
“Burglaries most often are reported well after the fact, and are not in and of themselves considered a high priority,” he said. He said if the burglar is still on the premises, or the burglary is in progress while a person is in the home, that raises the priority for 911 dispatchers, because the person is in more immediate danger.
Wiener’s story prompted neighbors to share their own stories of break-ins and what some called a disconnect between police response. Several raised concerns that dispatchers are at the heart of that disconnect. They also were concerned that a big area like District 2 (which includes lower and Upper Westville as well as West Hills and West Rock) might be understaffed. The current district manager, Sgt. Renee Dominguez, is out on maternity leave; neighbors said they weren’t sure who is acting in her absence. (Assistant Chief Al Vazquez, who oversees patrol, said Thursday that Dwight District Manager Sgt. Stephan Torquati is filling in as head of District 2.)
EDITED: A neighbor who is a new homeowner said at the meeting that she’s already had her car broken into and someone tried to get into her garage by tearing out her screens. The perpetrators ran when she saw them. Someone else tried to get into her neighbors house next door. Nothing was taken in any of those incidents, so she said she didn’t call 911. But she raised the question at the meeting of whether she should be calling 911 if such a thing should happen again.
The neighbor called the non-emergency line and learned that because she hadn’t called 911 in the previous incidents, and no police were dispatched, that there was no official police report filed. The dispatcher for the non-emergency line asked her what she wanted to happen next, but she had hoped for professional guidance from the dispatcher. She said she told the dispatcher that she wanted the police to know what happened, but was told that “since a crime didn’t happen, the police couldn’t do anything.”
Westville Alder Adam Marchand said he’s been getting similar reports from constituents about break-ins. He encouraged people to to invest in crime deterrents such as automatic floodlights, to secure windows, to keep bikes in garages.
“That said, the serious concerns raised here are legitimate,” he said suggesting that the management team might want to take its concerns to a higher authority in the police department.
Wiener said she’s been trying to get in touch with Chief Dean Esserman, going so far to write him and call him. He called her back, but she hasn’t been able to get him since, she said.
Amity/Beverly Hills Alder Richard Furlow suggested that neighbors send their stories to their alders, as well as bring them to the weekly Compstat data-sharing meeting held at police headquarters.
“This is something we’re trying to work on,” he said of safety problems. “It’s a big piece but it will take alders and civilians working together.”
As for Wiener, she said she’s lived in her home for about 30 years and never had anything like this happen before.
“It was so frightening,” she said. “I really haven’t slept well since.”