A 911 Wake-Up Call

When we have to dial 911, we take it for granted that a quick-thinking professional will pick up the phone, ask us just the right questions, and immediately send out police officers, firefighters, or emergency medical personnel.

At its best, that’s just how the 911 system works, qualifying it as one of the unsung miracles of day-to-day life.

But the 911 dispatchers who are so unwaveringly calm on the telephone are subject to enormous stresses all their own. The split-second logistics of lifesaving takes its toll in the best of times; now a shortage of Ventura County dispatchers has made that stress even more intense.

The county’s eight dispatch centers are so understaffed that some employees put in as many as 80 hours of overtime each month. At the end of one recent marathon shift, an overworked sheriff’s dispatcher failed to notice an urgent message on her computer screen. As a result, suspects in a burglary got away.

Dispatchers complain of fatigue, and many quit. Although the pay starts at $14 an hour, qualified applicants are so scarce that the supervisor of the California Highway Patrol’s Ventura center carries applications in her purse to press on sharp salesclerks. Even so, one out of every three positions at her center is vacant.

Ventura County should be proud of its 911 system’s efficiency. But before we allow our system to deteriorate for lack of staffing, we should take to heart the tough lessons learned elsewhere.

Five years ago, a mother and her three children died in a Los Angeles house fire. Perhaps they would have been saved had dispatchers managed to alert firefighters in something less than the 14 agonizing minutes it actually took.

The same year, a study showed that 911 calls in Los Angeles went unanswered so long that 325,000 callers simply hung up, presumably to fend for themselves in potentially life-threatening emergencies. Los Angeles has made progress in improving its system, but similar inefficiencies have gnawed away at 911 networks across the country.

Fortunately, Ventura County’s 911 system can’t be listed in critical condition--yet. Unless protective measures are taken soon, however, residents of one of the safest areas in the U.S. will be forced to wonder how safe they really are.

A number of steps can be taken immediately.

It wouldn’t take much for ordinary citizens to be more careful when using the telephone, particularly cell phones with buttons programmed to call 911. Some 40% of the 400 or so 911 calls fielded daily by the highway patrol’s Ventura office are hang-ups, mistakes, or nonemergencies.

Other measures should be considered by public-safety agencies. The most obvious is to cut down on overtime and excessive stress simply by hiring additional dispatchers.

A national task force on the issue is expected to recommend other actions that should be considered locally: Higher pay, better retirement benefits, less complicated computer procedures, airy workplaces that don’t have the feel of underground bunkers.

Ventura County law-enforcement officials need look only as far as Simi Valley to find a department that has managed to stem the exodus of 911 dispatchers. A few years ago, the shortage in Simi Valley ran as high as 50%. But the situation was turned around when the department implemented a number of improvements, including a bright new call center with its own kitchen.

Now is the time to find solutions--before a tragedy that could have been averted by fixing the system. Better to respond to a wake-up call than to an urgent cry for help.