Kyle Plush settlement includes new changes at 911 call center
As part of the settlement won against the city by Kyle Plush’s family, new recommendations for the city’s 911 call center have been issued.
The City of Cincinnati must pay $6 million and commit to long-term improvements for its Emergency Call Center to settle a wrongful death lawsuit with the family of Kyle Plush, a 16-year-old who suffocated in the back seat of his own van despite making multiple 911 calls for help.
The long-term recommendations for change were released by the Plush family’s attorney, Al Gerhardstein, on Tuesday.
“The most important thing in the settlement is the reform measures. We’ve got an agreement with the city that establishes an expert team, 911 experts from all over the country,” said Gerhardstein
at a press conference in April, explaining that the reforms will be court supervised for a fiveyear term.
A 47-page report released by Gerhardstein lays out issues found within Cincinnati’s 911 call center from technology to staffing to morale. It also found that, as a whole, the Cincinnati Emergency Communications Center has “extremely passionate, dedicated employees.”
It also found that many of those people leave because of low morale and a lack of communication with management.
Because of that, the report reads, the ECC cannot simply “hire its way out of ” the staffing issues that cause deeper problems. The report said overall management at the center meets industry standards, but that turnover is an issue.
The report specifically notes that every member of the administrative staff has less than two years in their current position.
Other recommendations include hiring a second operations manager, more formal training on newer policies and changing from a “statistics driven organization to a people-driven environment.”
The report recognized that the ECC has made significant improvements in its technology since the death of Plush, but that it could still introduce new tools that make it easier and faster to find people in distress.
Unions must also begin to put “short term goals aside” and work to be part of the solution, the report said.
It acknowledges that turning around the ECC won’t be easy and will take time, but it said current employees and management are capable of making the necessary changes.
Plush died April 10, 2018, in a parking lot across the street from Seven Hills School, which he attended. The teen, who was unusually small for his age, was taking items out of his minivan that afternoon when he became trapped in the thirdrow bench seat.
His cause of death would be termed “asphyxia caused by chest compression” by Hamilton County Coroner Lakshmi Sammarco; “positional asphyxiation” by prosecutor Joe Deters. Some mechanism in his van’s seats pressed against his chest until he suffocated and died.