Neither a veteran Germantown (Tenn.) public safety dispatcher or her supervising lieutenant followed up on a 911 call where at least 10 gunshots were audible because they had no way to look up the latitude and longitude of the call, and both believed—mistakenly—that department policy did not require them to dispatch an officer to a call with no location and no person’s name. The 911 call received by dispatcher Claudia Woods on July 19th was later linked to the murder of former NBA player Lorenzen Wright, whose body was found a week later about a mile and one-half from the coordinates displayed on Woods’ ANI/ALI screen. In transcripts of interviews with Woods, Lt. Donald Taylor, and dispatchers Richard Frederick Jr. and Chris Rowlson, the comm center personnel told investigators they followed departmental policy, and believe they did everything they could given their training and the availability of computer systems. Woods was interviewed by Germantown police Insp. Danny Payne as part of an internal investigation, and said the location of the cellular phone wasn’t plotted on her computer mapping screen. Sources say she heard gunfire, but that detail was redacted from the transcript. Woods said the call ended and she dialed the number back and heard only a generic voicemail greeting. The latitude and longitude of the call was displayed, but Woods told Payne, “We didn’t have the equipment to plot it.” Even though she heard gunfire and a latitude and longitude was displayed, no officers investigated the call. It was forgotten until 10 days later when investigators linked the call and Wright’s disappearance. Police reportedly used the cell phone signal to find Wright’s body in a field 10 days after the 911 call.
During the investigative interview, Woods said the mapping display indicated the call was made outside of Germantown. Payne asked her, “When it’s not in our (GPD) jurisdiction, are there steps that you take or don’t take or anything like that that?” Woods replied simply, “No, sir.” She also said she wouldn’t notify patrol of the call because, “it wasn’t in our jurisdiction.” When asked if she would notify the jurisdiction where the call originated, she said, “No.”
The handling of the 911 call has sparked emotionally-laced criticism from Wright’s family, who say the dispatcher should have dispatched officers and officers should have linked the 911 call to Wright’s disappearance much earlier.
In the interview transcripts of four Germantown comm center employees, Insp. Payne lets the personnel tell their own story, and fails to pointedly ask Wood about handling a call where gunfire is heard. He doesn’t follow up on most questions, and doesn’t ask them about their training for handling 911 calls. Several times he leads the questioning by including a possible answer within his question.
Supervisor’s Role
In an interview with Payne, Lt. Taylor sounded entirely unprepared to deal with any type of incident that would require Internet research, particularly through the use of a mapping application.
He said he heard Woods taking the call, then got up and walked over to her console. When he learned that only a latitude and longitude appeared on the ANI/ALI screen, he offered to plot the location using his iPhone. He tried to enter the latitude and longitude into the “Directions” field of the iPhone’s map application. However, it would not display a map of the location. [Typically, one would enter latitude and longitude using the “Search” feature of the iPhone map app, not the “Directions” feature. — Editor]
Taylor said, “At that point in time, you know, we looked at it as an unknown cell phone call. We couldn’t find the location, so that was it.” He described the call as, “Unknown call from an unknown location,” a description he used several times during the interview. He told the investigator that he did not inform the on-duty patrol supervisor of the call or consult with anyone else about the call, but admitted that he should have “bounced it off” the patrol lieutenant.
He explained during the investigative interview that the comm center previously had Internet access at the consoles. However, after some unexplained abuse, police officials blocked access to the Internet. In any event, Taylor said that he’s never used Google Maps or any other Internet mapping application, and had not been trained to look up latitude and longitude coordinates on-line.
Asked directly if Internet access might have helped located the 911 caller, Taylor said, “No.” But he did say that he’s requested that supervisors be granted access to the Internet.
He said the comm center receives 50 to 100 hang-up 911 calls a month from outside Germantown, including from Memphis or even Louisiana. When asked if dispatchers ever reported any of these calls to other jurisdictions, Taylor said they did not.
Asked by Payne if he believes he followed policy, Taylor replied, “Yes.”
But Payne then says to Taylor in a questioning voice, “Our policy indicates on a 911 call that we will send out a squad car even though it was dropped?” Taylor admits, “Now that I did not know.” He continues with the explanation, “But we get hundreds of 911 calls that are dropped. I mean hundreds. We have no locations. We don’t know who called.”
“So you had nothing to give,” asked Payne. “Right. I had nothing to give,” Taylor says.
Fellow Dispatchers
Dispatcher Chris Rowlson was working the jail position at the time the 911 call came in. He answered the call at the same time as Woods and heard the gunfire. But Rowlson then hung up to handle the police radio while Woods worked the phone call. He believes that Woods left a voicemail message when she called the phone number back.
Rowlson lost track of how the call was handled because he was dealing with radio traffic. He didn’t specifically recall if anyone ever listened to the logging tape of the 911 call.
Rowlson said that Woods did ask Lt. Taylor something like, “Should we call county or Memphis?” and “Should we pass this on?” He’s not sure what Taylor said in response to the questions.
Despite his limited information about how the call was handled, Rowlson believes it was handled properly. “I believe so,” he answered when asked by the investigator. But he wasn’t sure if Woods contacted any other agency, and wasn’t sure if either Woods or Taylor had pinpointed the location of the call.
Strangely, the investigator never asked Rowlson if he had encountered a similar call before, if he had ever looked up a latitude and longitude to determine a location, or how he might do latitude and longitude research.
The fourth person on-duty that night was Richard Frederick Jr., who told the investigator that, “I don’t have any recollection of it.” In fact, he believes he wasn’t even in the room at the time, and only learned of the call after he returned from a day off. “I may have been out on break or in the bathroom. I don’t know,” he said in the interview.
When asked about procedures, Frederick said that for outside jurisdiction 911 calls, “We’d contact whatever jurisdiction or whatever agency of that jurisdiction to let them know that we receive an open line cell phone call…”
As for following policy, Frederick said, “Everything that was done was what should be done.” The investigator rather leadingly asked, “So there’s a certain amount of work that we can lend to each and every call, but we’re limited to what we can do with some calls?” Frederick agreed with him—”Yes…The technology limits what we can do.”
Download the transcripts of the four comm center employees here. In the interviews, the notations “(Redacted)” appear to coincide with the words “gunfire” or “gunshots.”
11 comments… add one
I cannot believe they don’t know how to look up long & lat on a map. I understand if their in-house mapping program doesn’t plot the coordinates…but google earth, google maps, yahoo maps…. there are dozens of ways to do this on the internet. And if the supervisor’s iphone didn’t work, why not call someone…friend, family member anyone at home that could look it up. These dispatchers surely know someone who had access to the internet somewhere that could plug in the coordinates to get a location….
I agree with Sherri and also this confirms why jurisdictions need to share GIS map information. This is simply someone taking the time to load a shape file. From their own words, they regularly receive calls from outside their jurisdiction, so having the mapping information from the surrounding area is necessary and would have plotted this call when it was received.
I myself am a 911 dispatcher for a city that is double the size of Germantown if not three times. I’m sure we have more technology, more training and more manpower at any given time working in our 911 center then Germantown. Its always nice to read an article written by someone who has no clue what they are talking about and commented on by those who know less. Our society seems to have developed unreal expectations from too much TV of what your average public safety agency is capable of or even responsible for.
1. There are certain cellular carriers across the country that are not compliant with the higher phases of latitude and logitude ani/ali plotting. Each carrier is responsible for updating their technology and makign it available to 911 PSAPS(Public safety Answering Points).
Even if that victim was calling from a phone that had the avaialble technology it does not mean that the receving PSAP has the technology to interpret the latitude and longitude.
Consider that the plotting software is in place after a point that the cellular signal is lost the communication center would not be able to plot and narrow down the callers location. Typically the origninal lat and long is the tower site itself.
2. When the communication personel dont’ have the available technology provided by their agency they do not have the right or authority to contact a civilian, friend family member or otherwise, and provide them with information recieved from a 911 call. This could put the civilian in danger. It could damage an investigation and it could put the agency and the individiual employee at a liablity risk.
3. Most communication center IT departments have a sercurity risk with allowing the download of random 3rd party programs like google maps or other applications onto the extremtly expensive computer equipment that we use that normally has 5-10 other high priority and security protected programs used for police and fire dispatch purposes.
4. Lets consider that if she DID call some the responisble jurisdiction for the original location given by the 911 ani/ali and gave them the very limited information they had, and they responded a unit to the area what exactly do you expect them to find 1 1/2 miles from where the body was actually located?
5. At an agency our sizie, and I remind you is 2-3 times the size of the one in question, we do not have the available manpower to respond the approtriate number of untis to a hangup 911 or disconnected cellular number each time we receive one of these type calls. We can get hundreds to thousands a week if not more. We do our best to determine if there is a problem and to determine a possible location. Absent a proper location there is simply nothing we can do.
No 911 center should be held accountable for someone dying because a criminal shot them and they were unable to speak to someone and give some type of location. It’s a sad and terrible thing when anyone dies for any reason and especially so when they do so at the direct actions of a criminal event, but the blame n eeds to be placed with the crimanl and not the public safety agency that is there to help the best they are able.
Cell phones, 911 technology and other communication media(VOIP PHONES etc..) are wonderful technologies that have expanded our communication abilityand our ability to serve the public much more effiecently, however they are flawed and changing rapidly along with the technology. There is simply not enough funding for 911 centers to keep up with the technologies that are made available to the public for communications. Would you be willing to pay an extra 25-30 dollars a month on your phone bill to have state-of-the-art technology like you see on CSI (if it even exists) for a town of 40,000 people – money must come from somewhere? The demands placed on 911 centers by the fact that EVERYONE has a cell phone has increased exponentialy over the last few years. where we would get 1 call for a traffic accident now we might get 20-30 calls all which have to be answered, questioned, their safety must be considered, and all information recorded before releasing and moving to the next one and it must be done in a room at times staffed by 3-4 dispatchers, 2 of which are commited to sending resonding units to the accident before processing any calls. After the intial rush of calls, all those who got impatient and hung up have to be called back and verified that they did not have an emergency seperate from the accident, god forbid any of them were invovled in a seperate emergency like for example the shooting victim this article is based on. That is just one tiny aspect of what technology has made possible for the public and it’s 911 centers.
Todays public is woefully unaware of what is possible what is not possible and what ultimately should fall within the realm of responsiblity of a 911 operator. I don’t HAVE an Iphone nor do I want one. The fact that this dispatcher at least tried to use something that was not within his policy and procedures says that he was trying. HE however, did not shoot Mr. Wright, nor was he responsible for locating him in this particular situation from the information given in this very biased and uneducated article.
WOW! excellent response – well said.
Joe,
I don’t think anyone expects individual dispatchers to be miracle workers, nor should anyone hold (in most cases) an individual dispatcher responsible for a murderous act.
However, in 2010 agencies DO have a responsibility to provide the tools necessary to adequately perform those duties which are not only madated by local policy and procedure, but those things which are moraly “right” and possible to carry out, within the restraints of normal day to day business.
I just find it odd to read that your map cannot plot a lat/long because it was out of your jurisdication….our maps plot the whole state of Massachusetts as well as the southern parts of Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine and the nothern parts of Connecticut and Rhode Island.
I honestly know we do not send out people to wireless 911 hang ups, unless the state got the information first (our wireless calls go through the state police 911 call centers and then are sent out to the proper cities/towns)…but then again we rarely get wireless 911 hang-up.
But just to say our 911 mapping went down, we had the lat/long, I would probably use my main computer that has the CAD on it and hop on the internet and plug in the lat/long…especially where there was clearly gunshots in the background.
There is clearly a lot of advancements in the technology but not every state has taken, or can take, part in it and it is unfortunate. But your system should be able to plot coordinates out of your jurisdication…and on top of that they should’ve called the proper jurisdication with the information and let them deal with it, at least you disseminated the information.
And if you are gonna say well they would have to keep on looking for miles because that lat/long is the tower, don’t your ani/ali screens tell you how far away from the tower in meters and how confident it is (COF and COP)???
The technology is there it just needs to be used….and it is unfortunate that this man died and wasn’t found until 10 days later, when his cell phone was pinged (which could’ve been done that night too)…
Not all phones systems have the same mapping capabilities. I work for one of the largest cities in the country and our mapping capabilities expand to about 3 miles outside of our jurisdiction.
As for using the internet to plug-in coordinates, the article states that ALL internet capabilities are restricted in the questioned jurisdiction. I know that even in the agency I work for, we do not have internet access either, which becomes a vital role when people don’t have their exact address for where they are at in such a large city and they just give crossroads.
However, I do know that in my agency if we have an open line wireless call, where we hear something like gunshots in the background, our supervisors can do some research work with the wireless carrier to get some more information. But that is OUR policy. In the end this all boils down to policy. If she followed policy then great, don’t hold her responsible. If not, then maybe she should face some kind of punishment.
In this day and age, any agency that does not allow “some” access to the internet from within the communications center is negligent!
You need not download any “fancy” applications or software to locate coordinates on a map, you only need to enter them in google maps, yahoo maps, bing maps and any number of other wirely availabe map sites.
There are simply too many uses for the internet, especially given nomadic voip and wireless calls that which originate from outside many juridictions.
Given the avilability of filtering software and other applications, there simply is no valid reason to block all internet access.
[This is my opinion and in no way reflects the opinions or policy of my agency]
p.s. – my agency allows internet access at all (21) dispatch and call taking positions. We are all adults and have supervision. We deal with (occasional) violations as is required.
Well said Joe, I am also a 9-1-1 dispatcher, and the TV has really put into the publics head that you can get on your system and tell them who, what, when, and where just by pulling some-one’s name. And also as far as sending an officer out to the location that it give, your also right what good would it have done when the body was found 1 1/2 miles away, at that time of night no officer would be searching a field. I send my condolences to the Wright family, but it is not the dispatchers, or officers fault that this happened. The thing is nobody will ever know what happened unless someone comes forward and tells.. Also well said about calling a family member/friend, not only does that put them in risk, but it is also a privacy matter and can cause another lawsuit or loss of job.
WKNO-FM Radio in Memphis did a news story on cell phones and 911 and it is a very good piece of work. If you want to read and listen to the audio portion see the link below.
The reporter for WKNO-FM who reported wrote the article is:
Eleanor Boudreau
WKNO-FM Reporter
901.729.8746 (office)
617.785.6390 (cell)
eboudreau@wkno.org
http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/wkno/news.newsmain/article/0/0/1695544/Mid-South.News/The.9-1-1.Cell.Phone.Conundrum.
Thanks
WELL SAID JOE ! I MYSELF AM A DISPATCHER AND TAKE GREAT PRIDE IN MY JOB! IF THIS HAD BEEN ME, I WOULD HAVE PUT MORE WORK INTO IT BUT WOULD MOST PROBABLY HAVE COME TO THE SAME CONCLUSION. TECHNOLOGY IS OUT THERE BUT NOT READILY AVAILABLE TO SMALLER AGENCIES.
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