In an instant, he grabbed her by the throat and throttled her. He stopped only to readjust his grip and choked her again. Her body slumped inside her pink puffer coat. She made a muffled gurgling sound as if she were submerged in water.
“Stop!” I shouted from across Connecticut Avenue in downtown Washington, D.C. Other people closer screamed at him. I immediately called 911 while running through a mental checklist of what details to convey: location of the assault, description of the perpetrator, a summary of what just happened.
But instead of a dispatcher, a recording answered.
“D.C. 911. Please do not hang up,” the robotic voice said.
I did not hang up.
Seconds turned into a minute as the assault continued.
One minute turned into two.
“D.C. 911. Please do not hang up.”
When a human dispatcher finally answered two minutes and 11 seconds after I first dialed, the woman had escaped and was stumbling her way down the sidewalk. The man followed close behind calling her all manner of names, threatening all manner of harm.
“I’m going to end your b—— a——,” he told her once, then again, pointing his fingers at her in the shape of a gun.
The dispatcher, to her great credit, acted swiftly and professionally, sending help. D.C. Metropolitan Police, to their credit, arrived quickly thereafter, with officers in four patrol cars surrounding the man a couple blocks away from where the initial crime took place.
But the resolution to this troubling incident in early December seemed extremely lucky.
In emergency situations — house fires, heart attacks, a man attempting to squeeze the life out of a woman in broad daylight — every nanosecond counts. And in this instance, an apparent failure by D.C.’s municipal lifeline gave the bad guy a 131-second head start.
Five days later, while on the city’s northeast side, I had the unsettling occasion to call 9-1-1 again after hearing more than a dozen gunshots in rapid succession.
“D.C. 911. Please do not hang up,” the now familiar computer voice instructed.
It’d be another two minutes until a dispatcher answered.
So I wanted to know: Were these delays merely anomalies — freak glitches in D.C.’s emergency response matrix not representative of the norm?
Was it just one more infuriating anecdote fueling accusations of a fundamental government function’s shambolic state, not only here in the nation’s capital city, home to more than 700,000 residents in the midst of a crime wave, but across the nation?
Was I missing something?
The 15-second standard
In search of answers, I contacted Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser’s office and the D.C. Office of Unified Communications, which oversees the city’s 9-1-1 system.
The city, in response, pulled my 9-1-1 call logs and analyzed them.
For my call reporting the assault, one minute and 40 seconds officially elapsed from the time my call “hits DC911 system” to when it was “connected to 911 call taker.” For the gunshots, the official span was one minute and 41 seconds.
In both cases, the official elapsed time was slightly shorter than my count, likely because it doesn’t take into consideration the time it took for me to dial and the call itself to connect.
But the city acknowledged it was still exponentially outside the scope of the accepted national standard for answering 9-1-1 calls.
That standard, as I’d learn from the National Emergency Number Association, a professional emergency response nonprofit, is two-pronged:
- 90 percent of 9-1-1 calls should be answered in 15 seconds or less
- 95 percent of 9-1-1 calls should be answered in 20 seconds or less
How does D.C. rank against these benchmarks?
Not so well.
During fiscal year 2023, D.C. answered about 78 percent of 9-1-1 calls within 15 seconds or less, according to data provided by the Office of Unified Communication.
It answered just over 89 percent of 9-1-1 calls within 40 seconds. (The city did not provide a 20-second-or-less figure, but it would logically fall somewhere between 78 percent and 89 percent.)
So why did my calls, specifically, take so long to connect?
Call volume is one apparent factor.
During the assault I witnessed, D.C. government explained there were 66 9-1-1 calls placed citywide within a 15-minute time span of my own call, and “several for the same incident” that I had reported.
For the gunshots, there were 76 calls placed citywide within a 15-minute time span of my call, and “several for the same incidents of shots heard.”
Such call volume numbers exceed what D.C. officials consider “normal call volume.” This will invariably cause connection delays in what’s the nation’s 4th busiest 9-1-1 call center behind New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago.
Emergency call center vacancies are also a factor.
D.C. — like many cities — has suffered from 9-1-1 call center staffing shortages. There were 36 vacant 9-1-1 call-taking positions vacant as recently as May, according to testimony by Office of Unified Communications Director Heather McGaffin before the D.C. City Council’s Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety.
In a statement to Raw Story, McGaffin said her office has since filled most of those vacancies and continues “to focus on the hiring, retention, and training of our staff to build upon the trust and confidence residents have in us” and is “working to minimize wait times for callers.”
She also noted that her office has hired more call-takers during the final eight months of 2023 than were hired during all of 2021 and 2022 combined. Other changes include adding a fourth call center supervisor to each shift, and “more than doubling” training hours.
Progress, yes. But is it enough?
How to fix a broken 9-1-1 system
Those of us who came of age in the early 1990s may have had their first experience with 9-1-1 not by placing a phone call, but by listening to Public Enemy.
911 is a joke in yo town
Get up, get, get, get down
Late 911 wears the late crown
Flavor Flav wasn’t wrong.
Consider that a generation ago, D.C.’s inspector general reported that one-in-eight 9-1-1 calls never received an answer at all. Many American cities likewise struggled with understaffed, outmoded call centers that inspired little community trust.
Say I had witnessed an assault or heard repeated gunshots — and the date read Dec. 4, 1993.
At that time, I would have been seven years away from owning my first cell phone. To place a 9-1-1 call, I would have almost certainly sought out a payphone or ducked into a nearby business asking to use their private landline. I might have been the only person seeing something and saying something.
Much has changed since the dawn of the World Wide Web. Now, in the year of the Lord 2024, a full 17 out of 20 calls placed to 9-1-1 originate from a wireless device, per the National Emergency Number Association.
Data-rich “next generation 9-1-1” systems, with the capability to handle text messages, photos and video, have begun to come online, creating both the prospect for a better system and huge implementation challenges.
“Now you get calls for everything — 9-1-1 is going to fix anything,” said April Heinze, 9-1-1 and public safety support center operations director for the National Emergency Number Association.
With an exponential increase in call volume during the past three decades, local governments can only really plan staffing levels around what they deem “normal” call volumes to be, Heinze said.
“When the wheels fall off the cart, and something really significant happens, you cannot have enough people in a seat to be able to answer all the calls that are going to come in in a wireless world,” she explained.
Heinze noted attracting qualified applicants for 9-1-1 call-taker positions is always challenging, but particularly so in an economy where today’s civilian unemployment rate is below 4 percent.
A complicating and underappreciated fact: 9-1-1 call takers are not generally considered “protected service” first responders — at least, not in the same fashion as police, fire and EMS personnel.
They’re considered clerical workers.
This is a distinction with a massive difference: Without first responder designations, 9-1-1 call takers often don’t receive the kind of pay, benefits and job security as the folks with lights and sirens, making the job inherently less attractive.
All the while, the job is the very definition of high-stress. These call-takers go to work every day knowing that they may be the only thing between safety and disaster, living or dying, for a person in crisis.
And it takes a special kind of worker, with a certain kind of constitution, to stay calm, assess a situation and dispatch help when the caller on the other end of the line is a mother being stalked by a gunman, a child trapped in a burning building or a bystander about to get an instant lesson in performing CPR.
ALSO READ: 'Chaos': Fired Highland Park rec director details trauma of July 4 mass shooting
Turnover, as you might imagine, is high, Heinze said. Mental health and post-traumatic stress challenges are notable.
“9-1-1 professionals are the first first-responders,” said Brian Fontes, CEO of the National Emergency Number Association. “They should be classified as that protected and public safety service. They should have the resources, including staffing and technology, available to them in order to best serve the public.”
In Congress, there are several pending bills that address aspects of 9-1-1.
Most notably, the 911 SAVES Act of 2023, introduced by Reps. Norma Torres (D-CA) and Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA), and co-sponsored by a bipartisan roster of U.S. House members, would reclassify 9-1-1 call-taking as a “protective service occupation under the Standard Occupational Classification System. Bottom line? It would put the job at par with other first responders.
But it’s been languishing in the House Committee on Education and the Workforce since Nov. 8 and no votes on the bill are scheduled.
While the federal government has some power to effect 9-1-1 system changes, 9-1-1 is, by its nature, the function of local governments. The basics are the same regardless of your jurisdiction, but levels of funding, staffing and technology will vary to some extent from city to city, town to town.
Fontes singled out Alexandria, Va. — a D.C. suburb just across the Potomac River — as a municipality that operates a model 9-1-1 system. Had I witnessed an assault there instead of within Washington, D.C., it’s plausible I would have had a different 9-1-1 call experience.
Back in D.C., some community activists argue that even if the city had a full call-taker staff based on current budgeting levels, it still wouldn’t be adequate — and many, many more call-taker positions must be funded in the first place.
D.C.’s elected officials are also getting an earful from constituents. Some have proposed taking 9-1-1 call responsibilities away from McGaffin’s Office of Unified Communications and giving it to the city’s Fire and Emergency Medical Services Department.
D.C.’s system did work well for me when, after my initial 9-1-1 call to report the Dec. 4 assault, I called back to report that the suspect had walked around several blocks and was now standing under a tree on a different street. This time, D.C. call logs indicate my call connected within three seconds.
No matter the shortcomings of any 9-1-1 system, both Fontes and McGaffin agree that anyone in need of emergency help should immediately call 9-1-1 don’t give up.
“It’s critical that a caller does not hang up and remains on the line until their call is answered,” McGaffin said.
“Dial 9-1-1,” Fontes implored, acknowledging that some people may have other misgivings about contacting emergency services because they don’t trust law enforcement or don’t believe the government cares. “9-1-1 professionals — they are trained, they know how to help you during that emergency. No matter who you are, 9-1-1 is there to help you in the worst moment of your life.”
