New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg has released a consultant’s 134-page report critical of the city’s $2.1 billion 911 calltaking system—after a judge ordered its release—and critics immediately said the original document had been heavily edited by the mayor’s office to delete even more criticism by the consultant. The report confirmed what critics and even the city’s auditor have said previously about the system, including poor call handling by calltakers, lack of standard calltaking policies, poor performance analysis, and a lack of complete integration of the city’s public safety communications. The analysis by Winbourne Consulting LLC also clearly demonstrates the complexity of creating an effective and efficient emergency response system in America’s big cities. The report was ordered after response probles to the 2010 blizzard that hit the city. However, after Winbourne delivered the report to the city last year, Bloomberg refused to release it to the public, saying that its release would inhibit his administration from making decisions on the recommendations. A state judge disagreed with Bloomberg’s position and last month ordered him to release the report. Last Friday Bloomberg’s office released only paper copies of the report, and said it was the complete Winbourne analysis. However, the city firefighters’ union and other critics claim the as-delivered report was 216 pages, and that pages were removed. City officials have denied that claim.
The city consolidated its three separate police, fire and EMS dispatching operations into one building last year, a process that took almost a decade. Previously, anyone dialing 911 would reach a calltaker who would question the caller about their emergency. That calltaker would then transfer the caller to the appropriate agency’s comm center, where a second dispatcher would question the caller and obtain information for a response.
The original intent of the consolidation was to eliminate that second step of collecting information. However, as the Winbourne report points out, despite moving the three agency’s dispatching teams to one location, call-handling remains a three-agency operation, adding seconds to the response time of all incidents, as calls are transferred and callers must repeat information.
The 911 calltakers have not been adequately trained, the report states, particularly for handling fire-related incidents. The fire department’s dispatchers are also inadequately trained, according to the report. The three public safety agencies use different mapping systems, the report notes, and much of the technology they use is duplicated among three agencies.
The report also notes that police, fire and EMS use different formulas to calculate response times. Winbourne notes that most cities combine answering, call-handling, dispatching and travel times to create a total response time. However, the report notes that NYPD does not track any of the call-processing time, and states its response time only as the combination of incident dispatching and travel times. The police department says their current technology does not allow them to accurately track from when a 911 call is queued to when its entered for dispatch. (see p. 62).
New York does not track one segment of its overall response time: the time from when a call is answered by a calltaker to when it’s queued for dispatch. In New York City, the clock begins when a call is queued and stops when units arrive on-scene. Critics say it is accepted practice among other major cities to include this time, and that the Bloomberg administration deliberately excludes it to make response times look shorter.
The report also criticizes other aspects of the calltaking process, including that calltakers answer the phone by giving their personal ID number, which Winbourne claims wastes valuable time. The report notes that dispatcher IDs are logged electronically and don’t’ have to be spoken to be recorded on the phone logging tape.
According to Winbourne, a staggering 39 percent of the 1,071,121 calls to 911 during 2011 were so-called “short” calls, accidentally made from cellular phones. The consultant recommended collecting more information about these calls and devising a plan to lower the number through a public awareness campaign.
Winbourne issued 20 recommendations with the report, and Bloomberg said he would move quickly to form a committee to study those recommendations.
Download (pdf, 50 Mb) the Winbourne report here.
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