The 911 industry is on the verge of a crucial turning point: according to a recent industry study, increasing call volumes and severe staffing shortages are straining 911 centers in over half of the states in the U.S, and in the Bay Area’s major cities. This crisis is significant for public safety—and for those concerned about policing practices in Black and brown communities—because police officers’ actions are informed and guided by the information that they receive from 911 call takers. According to empirical studies, officers are significantly more likely to shoot if they are given inaccurate or misleading dispatch information.
For example, it has been demonstrated that when police officers are erroneously told that a subject has a gun, there is a significant increase in shooting errors. This finding has played out in horrific ways in police killings. In December 2021, based on inaccurate dispatch information about a “shooting” taking place, Los Angeles police escalated their use of force in a mall, and fatally shot fourteen-year-old Valentina Orellana-Peralta with a stray bullet. The supposed “shooter” that they were after was actually attacking people with a bicycle lock. Research by Jessica Gillooly, a sociology and criminal justice professor at Suffolk University, suggests that if the police had been told that the “shooter” did not have a gun– as some callers to 911 did accurately report– then they may have been more hesitant to open fire and the tragedy might have been averted.
The information that the police have about a scene—such as the expectations that they have about what they will encounter and the level of force that they prepare to apply—can all stem from the choices that 911 professionals make. And beyond the police department, the decision for a public safety system about whether to send the police or another responder, like one of the alternative first responder programs that we discussed earlier in this series, often rests with those who first answer 911 calls.
In this article, we will consider how dispatch operations can be improved and integrated into alternative first response systems. We focus on the need for retraining 911 professionals—dispatchers, call-takers, and support staff—who serve as the public’s initial contact point. We consulted experts like Professor Gillooly at Suffolk and spoke with the San Francisco Street Crisis Response Team to understand the importance of integrating 911 professionals into alternative response programs. For instance, 86% of the incidents handled by San Francisco’s team were rerouted from 911 dispatch, contrasting sharply with Oakland’s 6% rate, which has sparked community concerns. Berkely is taking proactive steps by establishing a separate call center for its forthcoming Specialized Care Unit. These efforts should encourage researchers to explore how alternative first response training could improve dispatcher response. What potential waits in the dispatch center for innovating the systems and processes that make up emergency response?
Staffing and Status Issues in the Dispatch Center
911 dispatchers in San Francisco are severely understaffed, to the point where the city had to lower its internal goal of providing a certain emergency response time—from picking up 90% of calls within 10 seconds to only 85%. These staffing issues are not new to the department: in 2017, the state sent the city a warning letter about slow call response times. After the letter, the city did begin the process of onboarding more dispatchers and improving its operations; however, the onset of the pandemic in 2020 brought about a nearly two-year hiring delay, and eight employees who did not comply with the city’s vaccine mandate left. In San Francisco and across the country, low pay, high stress, and poor management contribute to the profession’s high rates of turnover and burnout. Similar chronic staffing shortages have troubled the emergency departments in Oakland, Berkeley, and San Jose.
Public policy researchers at Transform911, an initiative based out of the University of Chicago Health Lab, suggest that workplace conditions for 911 professionals must be dramatically improved in order for local governments to better hire and retain staff. One strategy to improve conditions in the profession is to recategorize 911 professionals from their current classification as “administrative” or “clerical” workers to “protective service” employees. The blueprint advanced by policy organizations like Transform911, as well as a bipartisan group of members of Congress, suggests that the current administrative classification fails to capture the stressful, lifesaving, and consequential work that these employees are tasked with, and also makes it more difficult for these workers to argue for competitive salaries and get the same benefits that other public safety workers receive. The reclassification may be one step towards addressing the high rates of burnout and turnover in the field.
Interestingly, in some emergency departments, the 911 dispatcher was once considered a position of prestige. Gillooly documents how in the early days of emergency response, a prominent West Coast police executive selected phone operators based on which officers he thought were most likely to experience career advancement. This had changed dramatically by the late 1970s when a police journalist observed that the assignment to a call operator had become a punishment for sworn officers instead of a sign of career mobility. The decline in the status of the phone operator, Gillooly observes, coincided with when the police chiefs began to hire civilian women as operators, in part because they could be paid less.
Responding to Racial Bias on Both Sides of a 911 Call
In addition to creating staffing shortages, another consequence of overlooking 911 professionals in the push to rethink public safety is that these government workers are often given inadequate and unstandardized training, and lack consistent protocols to respond to emergencies. Untrained call-takers can contribute to situations in which 911 callers’ racial biases are passed on to the emergency department, and acted on by the police. At its worst, the call-taker’s own biases can even escalate situations.
An example of this kind of unnecessary call-taker escalation is the widely-covered arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr., a Black Harvard professor, on his doorstep in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Another study by Gillooly analyzes the initial 911 dispatch transcript from the call leading to the incident and demonstrates how, even though the caller expressed uncertainty and hesitancy about what was happening at the scene to the dispatcher, the dispatcher did not relay this to the responding officer. Instead, the dispatcher reported the incident as a possible in-progress breaking and entering, which primed the officer to enter the scene expecting an aggressive encounter. Gillooly’s research contends that dispatching can be improved by providing more sophisticated training to dispatchers and by altering the dispatching process, which currently does not capture and transmit caller uncertainty well.
Poor dispatching has had fatal consequences, such as in the case of the 2021 Los Angeles Police Department killing of the fourteen-year-old girl in a mall. The 2014 police killing of Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old Black boy, may have been averted if the police were told, as the dispatcher was, that the “gun” that Rice had was “probably fake” (it was, in fact, a toy gun). In a randomized control trial, researchers demonstrated that police rely heavily on dispatch information and are significantly more likely to shoot if they are erroneously told that the subject is armed.
On the other side of a 911 call is a caller who also may be acting on their racial biases. Local lawmakers in California have attempted to minimize racial bias from this side of the call through legislative action like the “CAREN” Act that was adopted in San Francisco and has since inspired a similar ordinance in Berkeley. These laws make it unlawful to knowingly make a false call to the police based on someone’s race, religion, or gender. They are often referred to as “Anti-Karen Laws,” as a reference to “Karen,” the archetypal privileged white 911 caller who unnecessarily summons police because of racially-biased views against Black and brown people. A similar law in New York was used to successfully sue and fine a white ice cream shop owner who called the police on peaceful Black Lives Matter protestors in August 2021.
Alternative First Response: An Opportunity for Retraining and Rethinking Dispatch
A city’s implementation of an alternative first-response program typically involves intensive retraining for dispatchers, which creates opportunities to reform dispatch protocols at large. For example, during the pilot period of the San Francisco Crisis Response Team, the team’s directors worked closely with the city’s dispatch center, retraining 180 dispatchers and releasing a regular bulletin with updates about the pilot. While retraining for alternative response, dispatchers can learn what kinds of calls are eligible for an unarmed, behavioral health-oriented approach in the place of a traditional police response. For San Francisco, this meant determining which calls were, in police dispatch terms, “800-B.” 800-B calls do not involve violence or a weapon.
Police dispatch codes depend on acuity levels, which describe how critical a situation is. When dispatchers assign emergencies to acuity levels such as A (high acuity) or B (mid acuity), they practice the skill of risk appraisal, a function that Gillooly identifies as essential for accurate 911 response, but which is often overlooked in training. During the risk appraisal process, a call-taker must extract the relevant information from the caller, interpret the information, and classify the incident in police dispatch code. Gillooly comments on how 911 call-taking in general “lacks strong governance over the risk appraisal process” which leaves call-takers to use their own subjective discretion.
Dispatcher retraining for alternative first-response programs provides an opportunity to train and refine the process of risk appraisal. Officials behind San Francisco’s Street Crisis Response Team told us that when they began retraining dispatchers, they paid careful attention to the question of how call-takers determine the acuity level of the calls, as those decisions would determine which calls the program was able to respond to. They also described a moment during training in which they had to think through and define exactly what a “weapon” is, as one call-taker had a different understanding than others. This kind of question hints at the complexity that is involved in classifying an endless variety of emergency situations into simple, standardized dispatcher terms.
In addition to fine-tuning risk appraisal by dispatchers, alternative first response programs can also implement systemwide reforms to dispatch protocols. When the Street Crisis Response Team entered Phase 2 of its implementation plan in June 2022, it made a department-wide change in which 800-B calls, or mid-acuity mental health-related calls, would be routed from the 911 operator to the city’s emergency medical dispatch instead of to the police department’s dispatch. Under the new system, if a 800-B incident is reported and all the Street Crisis Response Teams are busy, then an ambulance will be sent by default instead of the police. The change exemplifies how alternative response approaches can improve emergency departments on a systems level, and advance a health-oriented approach to crises. Technology can play a role, too. Researchers and policymakers are also exploring how alternative first-response programs can update the computer systems used by 911 dispatchers to report emergencies.
Above all else, officials leading alternative first response programs emphasize the need for close collaboration and coordination with 911 professionals. Andrew Dameron, the Director of Emergency Communications and 911 in Denver, observed that dispatchers may initially feel nervous about deviating from the traditional dispatch protocol. Sending an alternative first responder to an incident can feel like a radical change after decades of dispatching the police. In order to overcome this initial hesitancy, researchers at the NYU Policing Project suggest offering to bring dispatchers on ride-alongs so that they can demonstrate to them the value of the program. Regardless, the collaboration between alternative first responders and 911 professionals creates an opportunity to foundationally reform many of the systems and processes in a city’s emergency department.
Do All Emergencies Start with 911? An Alternate Approach in Oakland
Oakland’s alternative first responder program, MACRO, was recently criticized by community activists for responding to a relatively low number of 911 calls during its first 11 months in operation. But the criticism largely originated from the seemingly low percentage of incidents which were redirected to MACRO from the Oakland Police Department. Local journalists calculated that only 6% of the calls MACRO responded to from August 2022 to March 2023 were redirected from 911 dispatch. At first glance, the number stands in stark contrast with San Francisco’s Street Crisis Response Team, which reported that 86% of the incidents that they responded to in their first year were redirected from 911. However, a comparison of these numbers should take into account that Oakland’s 11-month impact report mentioned 5,414 total dispatches, and San Francisco’s preliminary report on its response team only considered 710 incidents.
It may also be worth considering the racial demographics of each city and the makeup of the people that are the subjects of the emergency calls the programs are responding to. In San Francisco, in February 2023, Black individuals made up 15% of the Street Crisis Response Team’s clients, a number that is higher than the 6% of the population that is Black across the city. In contrast, during the same month in Oakland, 62% of the MACRO program’s clients were Black, while across the city the population was only 22% Black. The MACRO program seems to serve a disproportionately high number of Black clients, a statistic that Oakland officials argue, in a recent impact report, shows the program is effectively achieving its purpose: “As MACRO was designated to do, over 84% of its service recipients are BIPOC.”
Further research may be needed to determine whether this difference in client demographics is a result of the different methods employed for finding incidents in San Francisco and in Oakland—and whether alternative responder programs should prioritize responding to 911 calls or seeking out situations where they can help residents. Most of the incidents that the Oakland team treats are referred to as “on-views”; they are incidents that the team comes across on its own as it moves around the community. This kind of proactive approach, which contrasts with the reactive nature of crisis response, also addresses an important unmet need in the community.
Studies have also documented that Black Americans are less likely to dial 911. By focusing on “on-view” incidents and going outside the scope of calls redirected from 911, Oakland may have found a novel way to provide care beyond the limitations of the current system. Another solution to resolve the tension between the racialized connotations of 911 and the mission of alternative responders may be found in Berkeley’s plan to create a separate call center which will have its own phone number for alternative response. Issues like this remain pressing for alternative response programs, and offer compelling opportunities to experiment with and redefine crisis response.