Metro 911 calls often put on hold

Adrienne Packer

Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2002 | 11:04 a.m.

When convenience store owner Joannie Hill's panicked clerk dialed 911 after an early morning robbery last week, he was hopeful the culprit -- still in plain sight -- would be nabbed.

But instead of reaching an attentive dispatcher on the other end of the line, the clerk received a recording asking him to hold.

"It was pathetic," said Hill, who asked that her eastside store not be named. "If we could have gotten through, they could have done something. But the guy's gone now."

A day later, at the Metro Communication Center where emergency calls outnumber operators, specialist Beverly Chavez eyes a timer monitoring on-hold calls as it ticks toward five minutes.

Both Hill and Chavez are frustrated.

The Las Vegas Valley's population boom and the popularity of cell phones has overloaded emergency phone lines. Combined with a shortage in 911 operators, calls are answered within the national standard of 10 seconds only 65 percent of the time, according to Metro Deputy Chief Richard McKee, who oversees the technical services division.

Numbers of callers put on hold because of the backlog were not immediately available. McKee said because of the millions of calls Metro receives each year, it does not maintain statistics related to the the average time a 911 caller spends on hold or the average time it takes before a call is answered.

The Metro delays aren't caused by a lack of funding or poor planning, McKee said. In three years the number of emergency operators authorized under the communication center's $18 million budget has increased by 120 percent.

Metro's goal is to hire 15 emergency operators each quarter as funding is provided, allowing for a total of 121 specialists by June. The center is currently budgeted for 87 specialists, but only has 62 operators.

The shortage is partly because the positions were approved this month and have yet to be filled. But the stressful job also has a high turnover rate.

McKee acknowledges delays are a serious problem at the communication center, but the emergency operators parked at the consoles for 10 hours each day are not to blame, he said.

"They go above and beyond every stinking day," McKee said of both emergency and non-emergency operators housed in the same communication center. "It's disheartening."

As 911 specialists punched at computers relentlessly in a vain attempt to keep panicked callers off hold, Chavez recalled her early years at Metro -- long before she moved into the $13 million communication center on Russell Road.

"There were times we had to sit around and wait for calls," Chavez said, simulating a yawn. "There is no downtime now."

Last fiscal year Metro operators received 3.2 million calls. The number of 911 calls has nearly doubled in the last four years -- from 549,031 to 938,000 this fiscal year, McKee said. About a half-million of emergency calls this year came from cell phones.

A decade ago two or three motorists sped to the nearest pay phone to report a bad accident; now 50 to 70 calls from cell phones flood the dispatch center, police said.

"We're working as fast and as hard as we can," Chavez said. "We have people in training; we're cranking them out as fast as we can."

Whether growth or mismanagement has contributed to the communication center's delays has become a contested topic in a tight race for sheriff between Deputy Chief Bill Young and Capt. Randy Oaks.

McKee cringes at critics' suggestion that the department wasn't prepared or was slow to react to growth. In 2000, the communication center, the fourth largest in the country, increased the total number of dispatch consoles from 13 to 53 and the building is readily expandable should the growth continue.

Although Metro was budgeted for new dispatchers to fill the consoles in 2000, they couldn't be hired at once. The equipment was new to the 54 veteran operators, who also had to undergo training. McKee said additional operators weren't hired to fill the vacant consoles until April.

The entire training process -- from application to duty -- takes about eight months.

In addition to the new hires, Young has pitched the idea of training injured officers to handle non-emergency calls, freeing up operators to move into the sound-deadened emergency dispatch center.

"It is a growth issue. It's the same reason Highway 95 is bumper to bumper, schools are in double session and it's difficult to find a parking space," Young said. "This is an area of the department that needs to be improved."

The communication center provides 911 services for the city of Las Vegas and Clark County. Henderson and North Las Vegas have their own dispatch centers.

Henderson police said they weren't aware of any wait time for callers to their 911 center. Numbers for the dispatch center run by North Las Vegas police weren't immediately available. Clark County Commissioner Erin Kenny, who serves on Metro's Fiscal Affairs Committee, said all of Metro's requests for positions in the communication center are always fulfilled.

Kenny, who attributed the delays to the stress of the job and high turnover rate in the dispatch center, said she, too, is concerned about how 911 calls are being handled.

"We are experiencing growing pains and training pains at the same time, but obviously this is a concern," said Kenny, a candidate for lieutenant governor. "911 should always immediately be answered."

He acknowledges, however, that putting a caller on hold can be the difference between life and death. And he empathizes with those who are forced to wait for emergency assistance.

"Folks forget my wife or my daughter might call 911 too," McKee said. "We are very aware of the problem."