Why can’t 911 find you in D.C.?
Megan Engle | Dec. 10, 2023
One warm, late-summer night in 2020, three men called 911 after falling out of their boat and into the Potomac River. Fifteen minutes later, rescue crews responded to the Anacostia River, four miles away.
Their bodies were recovered two days later.
Since then, at least eleven people have died in Washington after the Office of Unified Communications, which runs the District’s 911 call center, sent first responders to the wrong address. New reports suggest these address problems are the product of ongoing staffing issues, flawed technology, and poor management.
The call center has long been criticized by the public, and it has failed to meet national standards for emergency response times every year since 2019. In response to community pressure, the City Council passed legislation earlier this year that requires the agency to make more information public about 911 calls.
That data revealed that emergency services were sent to the wrong location nine times between July and September of this year. Three of those incidents occurred on the same day in September.
Cleo Subido, who was the interim director of the agency from 2021 to early 2023, says mistaken locations have been a problem long before public data sharing began. She claims that D.C. 911 dispatchers sent emergency services to the wrong address 10 times in a single day in 2022.
Subido, who previously worked at call centers in Seattle and King County in Washington state, said that when she took over she was surprised to learn that many of the District’s 911 operators were not familiar with the city.
“I think one of the very first things I discovered was the issue of the knowledge of the geography of the District,” she said. “It was something that I never seen in any of the centers I’d ever been associated with.”
Most of these mistakes were the product of data entry errors. Dispatchers have mistaken streets with similar names, entered street addresses as NE instead of SW, and entered street numbers wrong. Those errors sent responders miles in the wrong direction, significantly increased response times, and, in some cases, contributed to deaths.
“It’s really depressing. Like, if Google Maps knows where I am, why doesn’t 911?” said Jessie Merriman, a concerned D.C. resident.
To address these issues, the Washington 911 center says that they have tripled new dispatchers’ training time and doubled the number of supervisors per shift.
D.C. dispatchers already have the technology that could reduce location errors, but many are reluctant to rely on it.
Emergency call centers have been able to locate wireless callers with data from cell phone towers for about two decades. While experts say it is generally accurate, some call centers still discourage dispatchers from relying on it.
This technology first identifies the cell tower a call is routed through. Based on that, dispatchers receive a large, preliminary area with between a 10 and 25-mile radius. Then, by triangulating with other towers, a second, more precise location is generated. This second value generally provides dispatchers with a 1,000 to 3,000 square feet area for the caller’s location. That is slightly smaller than a basketball court.
However, there are limitations to this technology. In dense urban areas filled with office buildings and apartments, even this second area may not be very meaningful. Cell towers also cannot tell what floor of a building someone is on.
Additionally, when a cell tower experiences high call volumes, it can redirect a call to another tower before it reaches 911 operators. This can increase the time it takes to triangulate someone’s location and decrease location accuracy.
A 2020 audit of the D.C. call center reported that workers were “conditioned” not to trust location data for cell phone callers. Rather, they are trained to ask callers for their location at least twice, according to the audit.
“When you … have somebody yelling for help and at one point, even if it was four, five, eight years ago [and] that thing was wrong, that memory carries you,” said Subido.
Like most 911 centers around the country, the Washington call center is suffering from a staff shortage. With dispatchers spread thin, location mistakes and other errors are more common.
Currently, 82 percent of 911 dispatch centers in America are understaffed, according to a report by the National Emergency Number Association.
On average, these centers are about one-fourth below ideal staffing levels, the International Academies of Emergency Dispatch found. The same organization reports that the national turnover rate for emergency dispatchers has also doubled over the past three years.
“We’ve got experience evaporation happening,” said Ty Wooten, director of the International Academies of Emergency Dispatch. “You know if you [are] losing that experience, all that knowledge and expertise is walking out the door with them, and that can be just as detrimental to an in an agency as not having anybody there at all.”
Today, the District’s 911 call center is the fourth busiest in the country, behind New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles. With about 40 percent of shifts understaffed since August, the Washington agency is facing an almost unparalleled volume of calls with understaffing levels above the national average, according to the office’s own data.
When these centers are short-staffed, dispatchers often receive less training, work longer hours, report higher stress, and provide lower-quality service, a study from Walden University found.
Understaffing and high turnover rates in this field can be mainly attributed to the job’s relatively low pay and long hours, according to a survey conducted by the International Academies of Emergency Dispatch.
Full-time 911 dispatchers in D.C. earn on average $41,250 annually or 22 percent less than the District’s median income, according to the office’s 2022 budget report. They also face 12-hour shifts and are sometimes subject to mandatory overtime.
This year, on a cool, spring night in April, three people called 911 after their car crashed into the Anacostia River near the Frederick Douglas Bridge. Sixteen minutes later, rescue crews responded to the 11th Street Bridge, two miles away.
Their bodies were recovered an hour and a half later.
While D.C.’s 911 center says it has significant progress in addressing location, staffing, and technology problems, a 2023 audit found that the office has made “no clear documentation of progress” on many key issues.
To address its staff shortage, the D.C. 911 center is attempting to recruit new workers with job fairs, a high school outreach program, and $2,500 hiring bonuses. In late October, the office announced that they were also looking to hire temporary part-time dispatchers.
Despite these efforts, the frequency of understaffed shifts has been rising over the last four months, and the agency currently has 20 open positions.
As staffing remains a problem, the District’s 911 call center is focusing on how technology can further support its current team. To reduce address data entry errors, the office is working to both increase dispatchers’ trust in existing tools and modernize its technology.
When there is a location error, supervisors and dispatchers examine the human-entered, automatically generated, and actual addresses together.
“We can show them ‘See if you have relied on the location-determining technology, you would not have possibly missed this address,’” said Subido. “[It’s] giving them the confidence and showing them here's how we could do it next time.”
Soon, D.C. dispatchers should have access to new technology that may help improve location accuracy.
An Enhanced 911, or E911, initiative has been gradually rolling out across the country since 2019. Under this new system, GPS data –rather than cellular information– is used to determine a wireless caller's location.
For callers in jurisdictions where this program is operational, GPS services are activated and shared when a 911 call is placed.
This GPS-based location process is about 60 times more accurate than the cellular method. On average, it returns a 50-square-foot area estimate for the caller’s location, according to the telecommunications firm Utilities One. This process can also estimate a caller’s vertical location within a building.
Under FCC regulations, this technology should soon be implemented in D.C. and throughout the country.
This enhanced location technology may help lessen the effects of understaffing and add an extra layer of verification to the locating process. Once fully deployed, it will save an estimated 10,000 lives annually across the country, according to the FCC.
While this sounds promising, some remain concerned about understaffing and technology hesitancy.
“We can have the best technology in the world, … but if we don't have good, well-trained people who love their job and do it correct, while they're answering those [calls] and using those technologies, it doesn't really matter,” said Wooten.
For now, the D.C. 911 center says it remains committed to addressing its staffing and technology issues. It also asks the public to remain aware of their location and to share it clearly with dispatchers.
