An internal investigation by the Clark County (Wash.) Sheriff’s Office has found that a deputy violated policy when he self-cancelled his response to a welfare check initiated by a 911 call, but did respond two days later to a welfare check at the same location, where two people were found dead. The incident spotlights questions about who is responsible for ensuring a prompt law enforcement response—dispatcher or deputy—and exactly how incident information should be transmitted to the field. In this case, a man dialed 911 but hung up without talking to a dispatcher. The calltaker dialed back he number and talked to a man, who said his wife had accidentally dialed. But the man hung up when the calltaker asked to speak to the woman. The incident was coded as a “welfare check,” with the notation “Your discretion.” The incident was transmitted to a deputy over the sheriff’s mobile data system, and appeared on the assigned deputy’s computer screen. However, the deputy said he only saw the hang-up call information, and not that the calltaker talked to the man. The deputy checked the premise history, and found no entries. He then cancelled the incident and did not respond. Instead, he went to a pre-arranged lunch with his girlfriend and another deputy. Two days later, a family called to say their relatives had been out of communications. The same deputy responded and found a couple dead, apparently from a murder-suicide. The deputy was fired for canceling the call without permission and not responding to the incident. Download (pdf) the full disciplinary investigative report.
In the investigative report, calltaker Suzie Zimmer said she fielded a hang-up 911 call, and then called back the telephone number. The first call generated a computer-aided dispatch (CAD) incident coded as “incomplete call.” However, after she called back the phone and briefly talked to a man, Zimmer re-coded the incident as “welfare check.” After she entered the information, she moved on to other calls and incidents, and did not re-read or notice the disposition of the welfare incident.
However, Zimmer did have an interesting take on the responsibility for handling incidents. When asked, Zimmer said she was unaware of any policy about canceling incidents from the field (called Q4’ing an incident). When asked her reaction to a deputy canceling an incident, she said, “It’s off my shoulder. It’s his liability, not mine.” Zimmer said she would contact her supervisor about any cancellation questions, and they would take care of it. “I’m a dispatcher,” she said. “It’s not my job to tell grown men who have been trained how to do their job.”
Radio dispatcher Amy Coles said she viewed the incident on her computer screen, and then transmitted it to the deputy with the notation “your discretion.” She said there was no radio traffic about the initial dispatch. Coles told the investigator that the deputy never replied back, but “acknowledged” the call via his mobile terminal, which indicates that he saw it on-screen.
She explained her “your discretion” notation to the deputy. “You tell me, you read it. You tell me what you think. Basically we don’t have much information to go on here. It’s a lot of perception. You read the remarks she put in there and you tell me if you want to go, do you not want to go, do you want another car?”
Some minutes later Coles said the deputy radioed to ask if there was any premise history, and she told him, “Negative, no premise history.”
The deputy told investigators that he was driving, and may not have read all the incident details. He noted there is a limited amount of space on-screen, and it’s frequently necessary to scroll up and down to read an entire incident.
As for canceling the call, the deputy revealed the perhaps too complex thinking behind it. He said, “On a 911 call these are your thought patterns when going to the call. Well, they said it was accidental and you got a whole lot of other things on your plate that day. Doing investigations on other things, it’s your Monday and you’re trying to get back into your routine of what you’re going to do or who you’re going to see and what you gotta do. And on this particular call they said it was accidental and I wanted to go a step further, and asked about the premise history there, which is a typical thing to ask. When they said there was no history dispatch, never said this was out of the norm, I didn’t take the call.”
Other deputies explained that the sheriff’s office allows some types of incidents to be cancelled, such as fireworks and noise complaints. Deputies have discretion for this type of call with prior supervisor approval at the beginning of a shift, one deputy told investigators. However, it’s apparently not a formal policy. Instead, the cancellation of incidents has a “standard practice” over the past few years, another deputy said.
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