911 System Remains Swamped as Overhaul Inches Along

Nine years after Los Angeles voters approved $235 million in bonds to upgrade the city’s outdated 911 system, the new emergency dispatch centers are still under construction and more than 200,000 calls a year are going unanswered.

That’s the worst tally for abandoned calls that the 911 system has logged in five years, according to Los Angeles Police Department records.

The problem got so bad--almost 12% of 911 calls rang until the caller hung up in 2000--that the LAPD assigned 15 police officers to help operators answer the phones.

Meanwhile, the city’s promise to build twin 911 centers downtown and in the San Fernando Valley has slipped years behind schedule, knocked off track as officials haggled over where to build them. The duplicate centers are necessary, according to police, to ensure public safety in the event that one facility is disabled by an earthquake or some other disaster.

Officials say both centers were supposed to have opened last year, but they now say the Valley site won’t be ready until 2003, with the downtown Los Angeles center set to debut about six months earlier.

“It’s an extremely complex project,” said Lt. Dan Keefe, the LAPD’s project manager for the 911 centers. “No one has ever built a dual-dispatch system of this size before.”

The ailments afflicting the 911 system, considered overburdened and understaffed almost as soon as it was installed in 1984, are as persistent as the calls for help tumbling into the dispatch center.

One major problem is that four out of five callers are not reporting true emergencies, police say, clogging the lines with gripes about noisy parties, requests for street repair and crank calls.

Working conditions at the 911 dispatch center are so poor--picture a windowless room buried four stories under City Hall and crammed with operators juggling life-or-death calls--that about half the new operators leave the job within their first year.

The city has about 430 operators, trained to handle both incoming 911 calls and police dispatching. The center is staffed around the clock by a minimum of nine 911 operators. But there are more than 60 vacancies on the staff, forcing other operators to absorb larger call loads or work overtime.

The resulting strain on the system means thousands of calls are abandoned as nervous callers hang up before they can reach an operator.

Last year the 911 system received 1,854,149 calls and answered 1,369,041 of them within 10 seconds. Another 100,175 were answered within 20 seconds. The total number of abandoned calls was 219,733, according to the LAPD.

Police believe that the new 911 centers, featuring more than twice as many dispatch consoles, will help drive down the number of unanswered calls.

From the moment voters approved the 911 bond measure in 1992, the massive project has lumbered behind schedule. City officials said they were unprepared for the bond’s passage because two similar ballot measures had failed in 1990 and 1991.

But in 1992, riots sparked by not-guilty verdicts for four LAPD officers accused of beating motorist Rodney King helped convince voters that the time was ripe to upgrade police equipment and finance the construction of two dispatch centers.

Plodding Construction

Improvements have since been made on other parts of the emergency system, an intricate web of radios, telephones and computers that links dispatchers and police officers in the field. The LAPD has distributed more than 7,500 new hand-held radios to officers, added dozens of radio frequencies to its network and upgraded mobile data terminals in police cars.

But debates over where to build the 911 facilities and squabbles over contracts have slowed work on the dispatch centers--the hallmark of the bond measure.

At least four locations were considered for each center, a time-consuming process requiring myriad city reports and site visits. At one point in 1999, Mayor Richard Riordan held a news conference to demand that “faceless bureaucrats” stop analyzing yet another option for the Valley site--an option that might have saved $7 million but required more time--and begin construction immediately.

The 911 measure isn’t the only city bond measure to stumble. In 1989, voters approved bonds to pay for two new police stations and place sprinklers in six public buildings. More than a decade later, the new stations have not been built and sprinklers have been installed in only one building.

The spotty track record may have contributed to the failure of more recent proposals such as a 1999 bond measure for police and fire stations.

The dispatch centers now being built are almost 30 miles apart, one next to Parker Center downtown and the other at the corner of Roscoe Boulevard and Fallbrook Avenue in West Hills.

On Friday, the protracted project came under fire as City Council members questioned the LAPD’s handling of a $5.3-million contract to design communication systems for the 911 centers, a pair of matching $21-million hubs engineered to withstand earthquakes and provide a backup network if one center should falter.

Roger Ham, the LAPD’s chief information officer, told the council that the police department had decided to switch directions and buy a system that differed from the one originally approved, to take advantage of the latest technology. He then told the lawmakers that the overall effort remained “on target and on budget.”

“In my opinion, the city has once again made very costly mistakes,” objected Councilwoman Laura Chick, former chair of the council’s Public Safety Committee. “I find it insulting for [LAPD officials] to come in here and say, ‘Don’t worry, we’re on budget.’ Well, one of the reasons we have the money is because we’re moving so slowly . . . that we’re collecting interest on the people’s bond money.”

In fact, the city has reaped about $23 million in interest over the years, said project manager Keefe. The new money will help buy improved dispatching software for the 911 centers, he said.

The council approved the contract over Chick’s protests after Ham warned that any delay would throw the project off the current schedule.

As work on the new 911 centers plods on, the city has launched several initiatives aimed at improving emergency response.

In the summer of 1999, police set up a new toll-free number (877-ASK-LAPD) to handle nonemergency calls. A year later, they unveiled a $500,000 public relations campaign to promote the service--and hammer home the difference between life-threatening emergencies and not-so-serious problems--with catchy slogans such as “Are you in cardiac arrest? Or is your neighbor a pest?”

City officials are also working on a longer-term project to siphon nonemergency calls away from 911--a 311 number to handle requests for services such as tree trimming and pothole plugging. Funding for the 311 system is still uncertain, said Councilman Mike Feuer, who led the push for that system.

A Difficult Workplace

The ASK-LAPD operators are steadily getting more calls as the new number catches on, officials said. Last year, the service handled nearly 370,000 calls, a 70% jump over the previous year. But 911 calls also increased, a change at least partly a result of the recent spike in crime.

The city has also revamped the hiring process for new operators, said Lillian Brock, a longtime supervisor in the 911 center. Applicants are now tested on their ability to follow rapid-fire bursts of information--waitresses, for example, tend to make excellent 911 operators--and the city has stepped up efforts to recruit at job fairs.

“It’s all cyclical and we’re in a real bad cycle right now,” Brock said. “Right now, the working conditions these people deal with are terrible. It’s dark, it’s damp, sometimes it’s too hot. . . . It’s very bad for morale.”

Mike Boylls, a young LAPD officer temporarily assigned to the underground warren to help answer 911 calls, said he’s already grown tired of listening to kids cursing at him from pay phones the minute school gets out. And he’s only been here two months.

“This is 911 emergency,” he tells one caller wearily. “It’s not 411. Try again.”

Eager to hit the streets again, Boylls said he’s glad his three-month stint on the headset is almost up.

“It gets kind of old,” he said. “Most of the 911 calls aren’t real emergencies.”