Even if it does take 33 minutes for a policeman to arrive at a shooting because the 911 emergency center doesn’t know what it’s doing.

“In response to any kind of emergency, the city of Houston is in very good hands,” (Houston Emergency Center spokesman Joe) Laud said.
(Parenthetical inserted.)

What happened? According to KPRC Channel 2 Troubleshooters:

Amandre Wilson, 40 and her fiancé, Joseph Liebetreu, 43, were fatally shot during a robbery at Wilson’s town home, located in the 3900 block of Floyd Street near Leverkuhn Street, at about 12:15 a.m. on Dec. 22. Larry Joseph Tillman, 27, was charged with capital murder.

Nearly three months after the murders, Houston Emergency Center supervisors agree there was a problem.

“In our guidelines, it should have been a shooting emergency,” said Joe Laud, an H.E.C. spokesman.

And yet it wasn’t dispatched as such until the third 911 call!

December 22 at 12:15 a.m. was a Wednesday night/Thursday morning. Therefore this was not an overburdened weekend night, nor a holiday (yet). It should have been a routine, run-of-the-mill weeknight. Yet two dispatchers in a row screwed up:

Documents obtained by KPRC Local 2 showed that the first caller told a 911 operator he heard gunshots and saw a man running from the scene. The employee coded the call a low priority.

Gunshots. Plural. A suspect fleeing. Low priority?

Ten minutes later, another caller told a 911 operator that after he heard gunshots, he saw his neighbor laying in the doorway of her home. That operator only sent an ambulance.

Gunshots. Plural. A body. Ambulance, no police.

Fourteen minutes later, a dispatcher sent an officer to the scene after a third 911 call.

What did this one report? Graffitti? A Chief Hurtt acronym? After all, if gunshots, a fleeing suspect, and a body don’t warrant a police officer being sent immediately, clearly, the citizen is going to have to come up with something that will get the dispatcher’s attention! How can such a stupid screw-up happen? And why does it keep happening?

Despite the findings that HEC employees handled all of the calls incorrectly, the Troubleshooters were told none of them would be reprimanded.

Instead, a document showed that the employees would be retrained on how to handle these types of calls in the future.

“In our guidelines, it should have been a shooting emergency,” said Joe Laud, an H.E.C. spokesman.

An internal investigation revealed three H.E.C. call takers should have dispatched police sooner.

“This is a training issue. This is totally a training issue,” Laud said.

(Order of paragraphs altered from original to make a point.)

In the original article, the order of the paragrahps obscures the key line: “In our guidelines, it should have been a shooting emergency.” The report states that all three employees handled their calls incorrectly, not just the first two. Yet none of them will be reprimanded. Putting the facts together, there are only two ways all of this can be true. Either the civil service/police union rules are so screwed up, they can’t discipline them, or the employees handled the calls wrong because that is what their instructions told them to do.

This seems to be ruled out by the beginning of the statement: “In our guidelines. . . .” But that’s actually a fuzzy statement, because there’s no definition of what the reponse to a “shooting emergency” is, nor at what point the “shooting emergency” statement is true. During the first call? The second? The third? For that matter, the statement is so ambiguous it could mean that the guidelines themselve were wrong and it wasn’t a shooting emergency in the rules like it should have been!

Confused? Here’s what I’m talking about: hindsight is 20/20. We know that two people were shot and died — now. But the dispatcher that night does not, nor do the first two callers. As of the first report, about all the dispatcher knows is a gun was discharged and someone is running away. So what do they have? Some drunk shooting in the air? An argument that escalated? A drive by? And what does the city guidelines say about handling these (both now and at that time)? Is a firearms discharge automatically a shooting emergency?

Presumably some additional details were known (to the dispatcher) about the area it happened in–residential, commercial, mixed. The original article gives a poor idea of where the call is coming from; 3900 Floyd is very near the intersection of Heights and Washington. This is an area in flux; the construction moving west from downtown has resulted in a lot of new townhomes and such springing up near more run-down neighborhoods. Now, in a perfect world, every gunshot heard gets investigated quickly. The reality is, in many Houston neighborhoods, that isn’t the case, or if it is, there’s a significant delay. And Mrs. White is fine with that; witness the fact that a maid killed near River Oaks was front page news above the fold for three days, a couple of years ago but weekend killings in NE Houston are routinely two paragraphs on the back page and immediately forgotten.

So now the second call comes in. We’ve got gunshots and a body. As a sad case in Philidelphia showed a few years ago, you can’t guarantee that the dots have been connected between the two calls; the call and dispatch system may not support it. (There were nearly 70 calls in Philly’s case, which begs the question of why the humans didn’t notice.) You’d think shots and a body would rate a police dispatch; but can this employee tell if there’s been a dispatch to that address already? My educated guess is that yes, even if the incoming calls can’t be connected, the dispatches have to be linked in order to prevent duplicates. So he or she should have known that a policeman had been dispatched on the first call–but did they know that the dispatch was low priority? Is it part of the their procedure to check?

Finally, the third call comes in, reporting who knows what. Only now does the emergency operator make sure that an officer is dispatched immediately, but according to the report and public spokesperson, this operator did something wrong too — what, exactly, is not specified. He or she dispatched an officer immediately. So what was wrong? I have a feeling the answer to that question might answer a lot of other questions this incident raises.

“This is a training issue. This is totally a training issue,” Laud said. He seems to be awfully anxious to pin the blame on faulty training. But a host of questions stem from this assertation. They can be boiled down to the following:

• In what way was the training faulty? And Why?
• Was it that the employeeswere too dense to absorb the training given? If so, why are they being placed in service?
• If it’s not the employees, is it the guidelines? Are/were operators being trained in the wrong actions to take? And if so, why?

And again, the assertations of the H.E.C. lead us down certain logical paths. As I said before, if the employees aren’t being disciplined, then assuming no problems with unions or civil service rules, they aren’t being disciplined because the training problem isn’t their fault. If it’s not their fault, then it’s the fault of the training itself — or of another person, such as the trainer or a supervisor mis-instructing them on the floor. Since there is no mention of such a person being responsible, then we have to fall back on the training as the logical culprit.

Based on H.E.C.’s own statements as given by Joe Laud, I’m forced to conclude that theory has the higest chance of being correct. The problem is faulty training. But why is the training improper? And why doesn’t the H.E.C. want to admit it trained the employees incorrectly? Why speak about the whole thing in such an incomplete and ambiguous manner? Why release a report that suggests it’s the employees’ fault (but take no action against them), if the real problem is the training itself?

All too often, the City of Houston releases these deliberately misleading and ambiguous statements. Sometimes, it’s laziness–they just aren’t going to bother with the details because they think no one really cares. Sometimes it’s cynical under-estimation of the public and the press, whom they assume won’t be able (or won’t care) to follow the nuances of the affair. And all too often, it’s a deliberate ploy to hide the exact nature of the problem.

For instance, being fuzzy on this issue might anger people over a so-called disciplinary issue. That would distract everyone from wondering if the procedures were faulty because someone fiddled with them, trying to balance needs vs. resources. “Ok, we’re not going to run after every random bit of gunfire in the city; only if it’s clear someone was hurt does it get to be a high priority dispatch.” (Authority writes memo to state the above, but fails to anticipate all situations, and also forgets to make sure dispatch priorities are rechecked on call backs.)

In short, is this a “totally a training issue” because Chief Hurtt doesn’t want people wondering if the real problem is having so few officers on patrol that a report of gunshots fired does not automatically result in the immediate dispatch of an officer, even on a slow night?

Hmmmmmmm.

“In response to any kind of emergency, the city of Houston is in very good hands,” Laud said.

But are we in enough of those good hands?

Update: I just noticed something — 1st call happens then the 2nd is ten minutes later, then the third (preumably immediate response required) is 14 minutes after that, for a total of 24 minutes. The first officer arrives at the 33 minute mark. That’s a response time of nine minutes. Just as a reminder, all hell broke loose politically a few years ago when the average response time fell below five mintues.

What is our average response time now?