DC Auditor Heard Enough 911 Concerns to Start a Probe

Washington, D.C.’s 911 audit will test if “specific incidents add up to a larger picture” of systemic dispatching problems at the Office of Unified Communications, city Auditor Kathy Patterson said in a Friday interview. After the Office of D.C. Auditor (ODCA) released a request for proposals Thursday (see 2009240066), OUC and D.C. Council Judiciary and Public Safety Committee Chairman Charles Allen (D) welcomed an audit. They offered some defenses for local 911 personnel.

“It’s just a critically important part of government functioning to have a well-run 911 operation, and there have been enough concerns raised that it makes sense to take a good look,” said Patterson. Part of the review will be case studies of individual events, chronicling “what happened, what people who were concerned ... said about what happened [and] what the agency said they did.” A consultant to be hired will compare D.C.’s handling with national best practices, she said.

Patterson is personally concerned because she lives in the District, though she didn't have “immediate, personal knowledge of problems in the last several years.” She was a D.C. Council member 1995-2007, chairing the Judiciary Committee 2001-2004. “From time to time there were concerns” about 911. “I was on the council at the time when we created a unified communications center, so I was familiar with the promise that held,” she added. “This is a way of ... going back and looking at how did it turn out.” Residents and experts say OUC, whose creation promised better dispatching accuracy and other improvements, didn't deliver.

ODCA announced the probe now because a new fiscal year starts Wednesday, “and we have a budget that can accommodate a couple of contract audits,” Patterson said. More than four years ago, the National Transportation Safety Board recommended an independent outside audit of OUC as part of NTSB’s investigation into the January 2015 L’Enfant Plaza Metro subway fire, which included a late 911 dispatch. “I don’t know why no one else picked up on that,” said Patterson, saying she learned of the NTSB recommendation recently. “I wasn’t aware that that was something that had been recommended and not followed up on, and I wish I had known that, because then we might have factored it into our own work a little bit sooner.”

Ending Silence

Some D.C. government officials and politicians broke silence Friday on Thursday's announcement.

OUC "remains firmly committed to serving District residents and fulfilling its critical role in coordinating the most appropriate responses to all the city's 911 calls," emailed the 911 center's spokesperson. "We are confident in our performance and welcome an audit." That reflects past public remarks from Director Karima Holmes.

The local lawmaker who oversees OUC noted emergency dispatching mistakes do happen. The agency says many of those issues are due to caller error, and in some cases we have confirmed that after listening to the walkie-talkie radio traffic and interviewing stakeholders. Warren Communications News recently filed a Freedom of Information Act request for information on all 911 dispatching errors for FY 2020.

Judiciary Committee Chairman Allen said "the Auditor’s mission is to support the Council, and an independent and objective audit complements our ongoing oversight. Call takers and dispatchers may make mistakes -- as all people make mistakes, even well-trained first responders -- because they’re working in high-stress, high-volume environments."

Allen's "expectation" is there are "internal protocols" to prevent "serious, repeated, or systemic mistakes," said a statement his office emailed us Friday. If an error occurs, he expects "a robust quality assurance process to catch it, review it, and take corrective action so that it doesn’t happen again." There are "legitimate reasons why a call might be dispatched initially to the wrong address, as sometimes callers in crisis don’t know where they are, give the wrong quadrant, or make an error in noting the address of where they are located," Allen wrote. "Having the full picture of an incident -- and an agency’s overall operations -- is critical." D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson didn't comment.

The office of Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) remained mum on the audit Friday. The Fire and Emergency Medical Services Department and the Metropolitan Police Department declined to comment.

Patterson said she hasn't received OUC feedback on the audit yet, though she sent the office and interim Deputy Mayor for Public Safety and Justice Roger Mitchell a courtesy copy of the RFP. The audit office probably will send an engagement letter to OUC in late November, and Patterson doesn’t expect “any real interaction with the agency until then.” Patterson assumed OUC will cooperate: “I’ve worked with Dr. Mitchell on a number of other audits ... and it’s always been a very good working relationship.” A spokesperson in Mitchell's office noted that Bowser has wholeheartedly supported 911 center director Holmes, referring us to OUC's response and saying the mayor's office wasn't commenting right now.

City Council members didn’t raise concerns about 911 dispatching with Patterson, she said. Allen knew ODCA was considering the audit, but they haven’t discussed the matter “at any length,” she said. The auditor didn’t find any relevant OUC information when she checked the Judiciary committee’s budget report this year, “so I don’t have a good sense of what the committee’s concerns might be.” Patterson hasn’t “had any direct conversations” with police, firefighters or emergency medical technicians about 911 concerns, she said, but the hired audit firm might.

Mayor Bowser will likely be made aware of the probe by her staff, but the mayor typically doesn’t get directly involved in audits, Patterson said. When asked about possible 911 mistakes at an August news conference, Bowser said she didn’t want to “go down that rabbit hole with Dave Statter,” the 911 expert who flagged many of the dispatching incidents. Patterson said she knows Statter from when he was a reporter covering her on the council, and she believes he has expertise on the subject: “He talked with my staff just to present some of his concerns as ... a kickoff to a brainstorming session we had when we developed our ideas for our work plan.” Statter told us similar.

Editor's note: This is part of an ongoing series of articles about D.C. 911 dispatching problems. To read previous top news stories on this, see here, here, here and here. Our Notebooks on the subject are here, here and here.