The in-coming president of the National Emergency Number Association (NENA) says he supports a national program of certification for public safety dispatchers, just a week after the family of a Florida murder victim refocused their training reform efforts from Florida to nationwide. NENA president Craig Whittington made the remarks to a reporter after the keynote address at association’s annual conference in Forth Worth (Tex.), saying that tanning booth operators must be certified, “but for 911–the most critical link in emergency response–there is no certification.” His goal seems to coincide with the Denise Amber Lee Foundation, named for the woman who was kidnapped and murdered in Florida in Jan. 2008. Several mistakes in communications led to missed opportunities for police to apprehend the suspect, and possibly save Lee’s life. The family launched an effort last year to bring mandatory training to Florida, but legislators passed only a voluntary, unfunded certification program. Starting June 1st, the foundation’s goal has been broadened to a national dispatcher training requirement, according to the group’s Web site. As many as 36 states have some type of training regulations, although like Florida, not all are funded or mandatory.
Editorial
There are several issues are work in the murder of Denise Amber Lee: training of dispatchers, policies and procedures, employee competence, and supervision. Each played some part in the handling of telephone calls and radio traffic during the incident, and the communication of information among the involved agencies.
To attribute Ms. Lee’s death to “certification” or “training” is to ignore the many factors in play during the incident. It also makes a critical–and incorrect–assumption: that a curriculum of training and a certificate of completion will end citizens deaths.
In fact, the dispatchers who handled Ms. Lee’s case were trained, according to local agency-developed protocols. That these protocols were adequate and effective is demonstrated by the thousands of successfully-handled incidents that came before Ms. Lee’s death.
So what occurred? Simply, the dispatchers didn’t do what they were trained and required to do, and supervisors failed to notice these failures and take corrective action. Why did this occur this time, and not for previous incidents? That, really, is the critical question. By all accounts, this was a multi-agency, on-the-move incident covering a large geographic space, which always complicates comm center operations. Why there was not a designated contact person at each comm center, along with rigorous and unified communications is left to the involved agencies to figure out.
A national dispatcher training standard has not been on the radar of either NENA or APCO, probably because they recognize the futility of such an endeavor, both politically and economically. For the same reasons that we don’t have a national E911 network, a dispatcher training program would be impossible to create, administer or fund on a national level for the foreseeable future.
For the Lee family to want better training is understandable. For Whittington to voice support for a national training standard now seems to acknowledge the Lee family’s mission, not the realities of actually being able to implement it.
In 1995 APCO began Project 33 to create a national public safety telecommunicators training standard. However, eventually the word “national” in the standard disappeared, and it became “Minimum Standards for Public Safety Telecommunicators,” with certification by APCO for qualifying comm centers. Download (pdf) the current standard here, and the 1995 standard here.
Perhaps coincidentally, earlier this week APCO announced the latest agencies to meet the group’s Project 33 certification standard–six agencies. In a statement, APCO executive director George Rice said, “For many years APCO International has established competent training standards, which effectively prepare trainees to better understand their role and responsibilities within both public safety and related public service occupations.” Without mentioning any goal of taking the standard national, he continued, “We congratulate the recipients for recognizing the need for certification and recertification in their center and for the hard work employed to achieve the standard.”
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