Geoff Dougherty

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Data highlight communication problem

By GEOFF DOUGHERTY | St. Petersburg Times Staff Writer

Friday, Dec. 3, 1999, Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office communications center

Dispatcher Dan Eckert sits forward in his ergonomically designed chair, monitoring the more than 35 deputies under his control.

Although the room is light and airy, the Dell computers efficient, the atmosphere not much different from that of a call-taking center, Eckert is under intense pressure. Any urgent Sheriff’s Office incident that lingers on his glowing blue computer screen for more than five minutes requires a written explanation. Any delay of more than a minute can bring questions from one of two supervisors in the room.

They tolerate nothing but the speediest action on “hot” calls: Shootings, stabbings, domestic violence incidents. If the person sitting in Eckert’s chair regularly delays 911 calls, supervisors say, he’ll be given extensive retraining.

“If that failed, we would have to explore other options,” said Hillsborough communications manager Royce D. Wilson. “We would consider placing that person in a position where they are not a dispatcher.”

The emphasis on speed pays off. It takes an average of well under three minutes to handle an emergency call from the time the call-taker picks up the phone to the time it is assigned to a deputy.

One of those calls pops up on Eckert’s screen, flashing red. It’s a man with a gun at a convenience store on W Hillsborough Avenue. With so many deputies in the field, Eckert could easily be distracted by radio traffic about routine matters. That traffic would hold up the priority call on his screen.

So he gets on the radio: “I’ve got a priority call to dispatch,” he says, telling his deputies to hold their messages until after the incident is handled.

Eckert sends one car to the convenience store. He contacts two others and dispatches them, too. Within two minutes after Eckert receives the call, the Hillsborough Sheriff’s Office has three deputies racing to the convenience store.

Friday, Oct. 30, 1998, Pasco County Sheriff’s Office communications center

Country music floats from a nearby radio and the dimly lit room is filled with the clacking of keyboard keys as the dispatcher matches incoming police calls with deputies on the street.

On this night, she is responsible for roughly 20 deputies responding to calls in west Pasco, as well as a handful of supervisors, detectives and traffic cops.

At 8:04 p.m., someone calls the Sheriff’s Office to report a domestic-violence incident in Bayonet Point. The call, which is classified as urgent, pops up in red on the dispatcher’s computer screen.

Seconds later, she sends one of her deputies to a routine call about a suspicious incident on Mandarin Drive in Holiday. She takes a call from a deputy who says he’s now at the scene of another low-priority call in south Pasco.

Two minutes after the domestic-violence call arrived at the computer terminal, she has not yet looked at it. A nearby deputy – who presumably could have responded to the call – notifies her that he has pulled over a motorist for a traffic violation. She logs the information into the computer.

She handles another routine call in Holiday. It is now 8:09. Five minutes have elapsed since the domestic-violence call came in. Although a supervisor sits nearby, he has not asked the dispatcher about the priority one call, even though the delay warning is flashing. She pulls up the incident summary on her computer screen. She sees the call is from a man whose girlfriend jumped on him and is threatening to kill him.

The dispatcher deals with two more routine radio transmissions from deputies in the field.

At 8:11 p.m., seven minutes after the call came in, she dispatches it to a deputy. It takes him five minutes to drive to the scene.

A Times investigation indicates that the way the Pasco dispatcher handled that incident is not unusual. The newspaper analyzed a year’s worth of computerized dispatch records from the Sheriff’s Office and found urgent calls for help are often not answered promptly, even when deputies are available to handle them.

The Times found there is a deputy available to handle 80 percent of the potentially life-threatening calls. In those cases, it took an average of four minutes just to assign the call to the available deputy.

In more than 400 cases the delay was 10 minutes or longer.

In Hillsborough, the average is 2 minutes, 24 seconds.

Even that number doesn’t fully illustrate the degree of delay in Pasco. Hillsborough’s number includes the time needed for a call-taker to determine the location of the incident and the nature of the call. That time is not included in Pasco’s four-minute average.

Among the Pasco delays highlighted by the Times analysis:

On May 30, 1998, a fight broke out at the New Port Richey home of Chastity Owens. Owens’ boyfriend hit Owens’ brother in the head with a club, a Sheriff’s Office report said. The boyfriend hit another woman with an ashtray, the report said.

The Sheriff’s Office received the call at 6:37 a.m. A deputy was available at the time, but was not sent to the home until eight minutes later, records show.

In the intervening time, the dispatcher handled three routine radio transmissions, according to Sheriff’s Office logs.

On Aug. 15, 1998, an acquaintance of Josephine Wilson pulled her to the ground and tried to choke her, according to a Sheriff’s Office report. Wilson called the Sheriff’s Office at 6:38 p.m. She then ran outside. The man chased her with a hammer, threatening to kill her. The man hit her in the arm with a baseball bat, the report said.

The Sheriff’s Office had a deputy available. But in the minutes after the call, the dispatcher handled four routine radio transmissions. It wasn’t until four minutes later that a deputy was sent to Wilson’s address.

On Jan. 21, 1998, the Sheriff’s Office received a call about a domestic disturbance in progress on Sunfish Drive in Hudson. According to a witness statement, a 43-year-old woman repeatedly punched her boyfriend and hit him with a brass ornament.

The Sheriff’s Office received the call at 6:28 p.m. Although a deputy was available at the time of the call, he was not dispatched until 17 minutes later.

Drew Diamond, a retired Tulsa, Okla., police chief who is now a management consultant, said delays like that can put residents in danger.

“This kind of delay would in fact endanger someone. Seventeen minutes certainly would put people at risk,” said Diamond, who works for the Police Executive Research Forum. “Waiting 17 minutes to dispatch that call ... I think that would be a problem the Sheriff’s Office would want to review.”

The department’s average four-minute delay also is worrisome and possibly dangerous.

“It seems to me like an inordinate amount of time,” said John Doherty, a former police captain who now teaches criminal justice at Marist College in New York. “That is not good. If I’m the person whose life is on the line, I want that delay to be less than a tenth of a second.”

Lt. Robert Stone, who manages the Pasco sheriff’s communications center, said the delays are a concern.

“Are there people waiting on important calls because of that?” he asked during an interview. “Probably.”

All the same, the department defended its communications procedures, saying they generally lead to the quickest possible response.

In regard to the incidents highlighted by the Times study, sheriff’s officials said they didn’t have enough information to explain what might have happened. The department does not keep tape recordings of dispatcher activity going back that far.

The hundreds of delayed calls found by the newspaper were categorized as priority one incidents, but there is no way to tell whether they were, in fact, life-threatening matters. Because of record-keeping problems at the Sheriff’s Office, many less-serious incidents also are categorized as urgent calls.

Although it’s difficult to tell what might have happened on any one incident, the Times investigation found the technical details of the Sheriff’s Office communications system make it difficult for dispatchers to send help to the most important calls first.

The department’s computers automatically assign a priority to each call for help based on the incident type selected by the call-taker. For instance, a stabbing in progress would be a priority one, while someone complaining about a three-day-old incident of mailbox vandalism might be a priority four.

The computer then highlights priority one incidents for the dispatchers, coloring them red on the monitors and setting off a warning light if they are not assigned to a deputy within a minute.

The newspaper found a critical flaw in that system: Many calls that are not life-threatening are classified as priority one.

Those calls can include such mundane things as a mentally ill person bothering somebody at a store, a group of teenagers gathered in a shopping center parking lot and a malfunctioning home burglar alarm.

All appear as urgent calls on the dispatcher’s screen, flashing red and demanding immediate attention.

That means the dispatchers cannot easily separate the truly urgent calls from ones that do not involve significant risk to residents.

“It probably overwhelms them,” Stone said. “They have to look at all these calls and determine which of them is more of a priority than the other one.”

In the years after the Sheriff’s Office brought its new computer system online in August 1996, the proportion of priority one calls to other incidents more than tripled, the newspaper’s analysis shows.

The Times consultant also concluded the system of call priorities is flawed.

“It’s funny how the root of all this (delay) is defining what are your real priority calls,” said the consultant, George Sullivan.

He said it should take less than a minute for dispatchers to send a high-priority call to an available deputy.

Officials in Hillsborough cite a similar standard.

Hillsborough communications supervisor Brad Herron said the department’s speedy average is due to one thing:

“Prioritization,” he said. “That’s the entire battle. It makes all the difference in the world.”

Diamond agrees, noting that a loosely drawn list of priority one calls is certain to cause delay.

“Everything is going to slow down,” he said. “It’s like false alarm calls. It’s like crying: “The sky is falling,’ all the time. After a while, nobody pays attention.”

After the Times began examining how the Sheriff’s Office handles priority one calls, officials said they were re-assessing the way their dispatch system works.

They concluded that some calls, such as burglar alarms and juvenile disturbances, should receive a lower priority.

“The computer automatically assigns those priorities,” Stone said in a 1998 interview. “When we set up the system, that seemed like a real good idea. In practicality it’s not. We agree there are some difficulties there.”

In another interview on Monday, Stone said the department had just finished changing the call-priority system to deal with the questions raised by the Times study. That new system took effect at the beginning of the new year.

The Sheriff’s Office also has installed a third radio channel for dispatchers to use, which Stone and others hope will cut down on radio congestion and speed communications between deputies and the communications center.

January 23, 2000