S.F.’s emergency call center is finally getting up to speed
San Francisco’s long-troubled 911 call center finally reached a mundane yet remarkable milestone this past month: answering 90 percent of the emergency calls it receives within 10 seconds.
A quick response to an emergency call should be among the most basic, reliable services a city provides. But incredibly, as this column has reported, San Francisco’s dispatch center hadn’t hit the 90 percent target — the national standard that all functional 911 call centers should meet as their baseline — since March 2012.
That’s nearly six years during which San Franciscans couldn’t rely on their 911 calls being picked up and responded to promptly. The lowest point came just eight months ago, when the dispatch center was answering a mere 66 percent of calls within 10 seconds.
That meant that back in April, if your house caught on fire, your baby was choking or an armed robber entered your home, you had just a twothirds chance of getting a speedy answer to your 911 call. Now, after officially ending
November with a quick-answer rate of 89.4 percent, the odds are more like 9 in 10.
Asked whether he thought he would ever see his dispatch center meet the sought-after standard, Robert Smuts, the city’s deputy director for emergency communications, laughed wryly.
“Sometimes it didn’t seem like it, but yes,” he said. “We’re very happy to finally be getting there.”
The achievement comes after intense examination of his department by the mayor, the Board of Supervisors and The Chronicle, but Smuts said he won’t stop pushing for improvements at the call center just because it’s reached the goal.
“We’re not going to rest at hitting our standard — we’re going to work to really be the best center possible. I think the scrutiny that you and everyone else gave us is very helpful for getting there,” he told me.
About that scrutiny — let’s review:
Back in the spring, the 90 percent milestone seemed far off, perhaps unobtainable.
In April, I told you about William Ellis, a 66-year-old homeless man who suffered cardiac arrest and collapsed at the back of St. Boniface Church in the Tenderloin. Three people rushed to him and dialed 911 on their cell phones. None of them could get through.
“It was ringing and ringing and ringing like I’d called somebody’s house phone,” said Porsha Dixson, a church worker.
After somebody finally got an answer, Ellis was whisked to San Francisco General Hospital in an ambulance. He died six days later.
On April 21, when a massive power outage left about 90,000 Pacific Gas and Electric Co. customers in the dark, there were initially only nine dispatchers working to take calls. During the outage, 500 calls to 911 were abandoned, meaning the caller hung up before getting an answer.
The center’s problems, known at City Hall for years but pretty much ignored, stemmed from a swelling population making more 911 calls, necessitating mandatory overtime shifts for dispatchers. Forced to work 12- and 14-hour days, as well as weekends and holidays, dispatchers burned out. As many quit, the job grew even more burdensome for those who stayed.
Mayor Ed Lee on May 2 issued an executive order demanding that the Department of Emergency Management deal with its staffing shortage and meet the 90 percent target. He formed a task force to make recommendations and ordered the dispatch center to publish weekly reports on its progress.
He told reporters shortly after issuing the order that he was determined to get the response time up.
“I want that 10-second turnaround standard to be there right now,” Lee said in May. “It has to be within the next month — a month or two months.”
It would take nearly 6 months more, but it has finally happened.
Lee told me that directing 911 dispatchers to transfer calls about car break-ins that weren’t in progress and some calls about homelessness to 311 helped lessen the dispatchers’ load. In addition, a new public awareness campaign directing the public on when — and, more importantly, when — to call 911 may be starting to help.
In addition, the Civic Bridge program, which is run by the Mayor’s Office of Civic Innovation and recruits privatesector experts to donate their time, has brought in outside consultants to help the dispatch center. Teams are working on improving the public awareness campaign and tracking its results, and on improving and shortening the year-long training program for new dispatchers.
“I want to say thank you to everybody who worked on it,” Lee told me Wednesday, referring to the call center reaching the 90 percent mark. “We’ll keep doing whatever we need to do to keep that high level of performance up for people who depend on that 911 system.”
Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who held a hearing on the center’s poor performance and pushed for funding for the public awareness campaign, said it’s good the center is finally answering calls as it should, but still shocking there were nearly six years when it wasn’t.
“We shouldn’t be patting ourselves on the back for doing what we’re supposed to be doing,” Peskin said.
The dispatch center hit its 90 percent target in the first week of November, reached 91 percent in the second week and sunk a bit to 88 percent in the third week before rising again. On average for the month, the dispatch center answered just under 90 percent of calls within 10 seconds.
Just as the center met its goal, however, the goalpost moved. A new industry effort is now pushing for centers to answer 95 percent of calls within 15 seconds. Smuts is tracking that figure, too. He said the center is just a couple of percentage points shy of that new target and will hit it soon.
One reason for a strong November, he allowed, is that the month always sees a dropoff in calls from October, a warm, busy month in the city. In November, when daylightsaving time is over and the weather is colder, people aren’t outside as much, which lessens the chance for emergencies.
The first week of November had an average daily emergency call volume of 1,997, a 3 percent decrease from the previous week.
Smuts said he’s confident, however, that the center’s success will continue, regardless of call volume.
That’s because more cityfunded training classes are bringing on more dispatchers to help. Ideally, the center would have 165 dispatchers. Back in April, it had 105. Now, it’s up to 123.
Smuts said nine others will be released from training to join the regular staff at the end of December. Another nine will complete training in March, 14 more next June, and still more in October 2018.
Burt Wilson, president of the dispatchers’ union, said the results are proof the city should have listened to dispatchers’ warnings long ago. His workers have been raising the red flag for years, asking for more staff to join them and more attention from the city to get a smoothly running center.
“It doesn’t take a rocket scientist,” Wilson said. “That’s what we’ve been asking for.”
Wilson said the center is “running a lot better.”
“You’re taking less calls; the bells are ringing less; it’s less stressful here,” he said.
Still, he warned that nothing has really changed for longtime dispatchers, some of whom are still quitting to work at call centers that are closer to home or that pay better. They’re still required to work overtime shifts regularly. Wilson, for example, worked a grueling 4 a.m. to 6 p.m. shift on Thanksgiving.
Negotiations with the city’s human resources department broke down when the union rejected an offer of a bonus rather than a permanent salary increase. The union’s longtime request for dispatchers to be granted more generous public safety pensions is also dead.
The city still needs to figure out how to hold onto dispatchers because, as Wilson pointed out, the staff is becoming far less experienced as more senior call-takers quit.
Smuts said regular mandatory overtime shifts should be ended in about a month. Dispatchers will be required to work overtime only on especially busy days, such as Gay Pride Parade day and the Fourth of July, he said.
Smuts is also working on easing the scheduling of time off; currently, dispatchers say, they have to plead to attend family weddings and other important events.
Wilson said he’ll believe the long-promised changes when he sees them. Still, he and everybody else I talked to said they believe the call center is equipped to handle the next major emergency — earthquake, mass shooting, plane crash or whatever else — that may strike San Francisco.
“In that kind of a situation, everybody forgets all these little problems we’re having and does their job,” Wilson said. “That’s what’s been saving the city all these years.”
Let’s hope, for the sake of the dispatchers, city residents and anybody who spends time in San Francisco, that the improvements continue and more progress is made.