Heather McGaffin, director of the city’s embattled 911 agency, focused on improvements at the call center but declined to answer specific questions regarding errors at a council hearing.

Colleen Grablick / DCist/WAMU

Heather McGaffin, the head of D.C.’s often scrutinized 911 call center, defended her agency’s performance Thursday amid heavy criticism from both the public and lawmakers.

The oversight performance hearing on Thursday in the D.C. Council’s Judiciary Committee comes as complaints mount against the Office of Unified Communications, which manages 911 response. Over the years, dispatching problems and mistakes – some of which have resulted in the loss of life – have eroded public trust in the agency.

Most recently, the agency came under intense criticism for its delayed response to a deadly flood at a doggy daycare, but OUC failures date back years, as does a perceived unwillingness on leadership’s part to acknowledge systemic problems within the department, which falls under Mayor Muriel Bowser’s executive branch.

Several times the agency has sent emergency responders to the wrong locations or kept people on hold for several minutes. For example, it took OUC more than four minutes to dispatch responders to a fire that killed two people in 2019, and in 2020, OUC dispatchers responded to the wrong river for a boating accident in which three people died. The D.C. Auditor issued an initial audit of OUC in 2021, identifying problems with location accuracy and wait times, and included 31 recommendations. A year later, only one of those recommendations had been implemented, a follow-up audit found.

McGaffin, who began leading the department earlier this year, largely focused her testimony on the improvements that have been made at the agency over the past several months. She emphasized a hiring blitz that should, by Jan. 1, drastically improve staffing on every shift, technology upgrades that should streamline emergency communications, and a commitment to consistent training and institutional health supports for call-takers to ensure they’re equipped for a stressful, tiring job.

“We know there’s work to do here,” McGaffin said. “But the majority of 911 calls are being answered swiftly and we will continue to work to lower wait times.”

But members of the public, ANC commissioners, and councilmembers questioned McGaffin’s confidence in her agency’s operations at the hearing and reiterated long-held critiques of OUC’s operations — from long hold times to dispatching errors to understaffing. Multiple ANC members and D.C. Auditor Kathy Patterson offered what they see as implementable solutions to the committee chair, Ward 2 Councilmember Brooke Pinto. They discussed improvements like better wages for call-takers and an independent task force to oversee OUC, but also acknowledged they had little faith that these demands would be heard by executive leadership.

“As other witnesses have noted today, this administration has not even acknowledged the need for reform,” Patterson said. “I think in any recovery system, step one is acknowledging the problem, and we’re not even through step one. I would caution against being overly optimistic that with an administration that has so far failed to acknowledge the problem, additional recommendations will be heeded.”

Patterson said change at OUC may have to come through council legislation — some of which is currently up for a vote this fall. Earlier this summer, the council passed emergency legislation that required the agency to publish a performance data dashboard, documenting statistics like dropped calls, wait times, and shift staffing. The agency published its first batch of data in September, which showed that 40% of shifts in the month of August were understaffed and that callers were kept on hold for up to three minutes. (National standards require that 90% of 911 calls should be answered within 15 seconds.) A permanent bill is being considered this fall as a part of Pinto’s public safety package. 

While Pinto and other councilmembers acknowledged OUC’s effort in standing up the dashboard, residents who testified in the public hearing said the reporting does little to explain systemic failures within OUC, nor does it provide information that residents are most interested in, such as the time it takes from the moment a call is placed to 911 to the moment dispatchers send out responders. (When a call is placed at 911, a call taker speaks to the caller and loads information into an electronic card; a dispatcher then reviews that information and connects with the proper agency, like D.C. Fire and EMS or MPD.)

“While requiring more data is helpful, it won’t fix OUC,” testified ANC Commissioner Colleen Costello. “We have the data and it tells the same story: OUC is failing badly.”

Costello lost her dog in the flood at District Dogs, a D.C. dog daycare, in August. It took OUC more than 20 minutes to dispatch response teams to rescue the dogs and people trapped in the flooding daycare on Rhode Island Avenue. Ultimately, 10 dogs died.

After more than a week without answers from residents, McGaffin said a 911 dispatcher had incorrectly categorized the calls coming from the flooding daycare as “water leaks,” instead of something more urgent, like a water rescue. She was reluctant to characterize this as a mistake at the time, and on Thursday refused to answer further questions about the District Dogs response during the hearing.

“There wasn’t a delay,” McGaffin said. “We immediately put the card in and it was dispatched.”

Ward 5 Councilmember Zachary Parker, who earlier in the hearing had said he appreciated McGaffin’s apparent openness to questioning and improvement, expressed his disappointment in her lack of clarity.

“It makes me a little uncomfortable to hear you say you can’t answer certain questions,” he said. “I’m hoping that doesn’t become a pattern. I’ve noted today and said before, I’ve found you to be pretty forthcoming, and I respectfully suggest that I don’t think the executive has a certain privilege not to answer questions with oversight.”

The District Dogs flood was just one in a long series of life-threatening errors made by OUC over the years, the impact of which was painful and evident during Thursday’s hearing.

Resident Toni Barnes shared the story of her 27-year-old daughter, who in April had an asthma attack. Barnes said she was on and off hold for 19 minutes trying to speak to a call-taker. Her daughter ended up having an anoxic brain injury and was in the ICU for 30 days, followed by eight weeks in a rehabilitation center.

“Prior to this, Alexus was a healthy 27-year-old, other than asthma. Now she’s suffering with vision. She depends on me for everything; she has problems walking, I have to feed her,” Barnes testified through tears. “I just feel like I should not have been on hold for that long, that’s unacceptable. I want to know – what are we going to do to make this better in the future?”

Another resident, who was at the Potomac Avenue Metro when a man opened fire and ultimately killed a Metro employee, said she could not get through to 911 as she huddled behind an elevator on the platform. Months later, she said she was assaulted near home in an attempted robbery; she said she and two other witnesses tried to call 911, and had to hang up and call back in order to reach a call taker.

“OUC’s failures inflict necessary trauma on people in need,” she said. “ It took months for me to sleep through the night, to walk alone in my neighborhood. It is an awful feeling to accept that you are on your own, and no one is coming.”

McGaffin outlined several improvements made by the agency in recent months that, she says, should improve wait times and overall call-taker and dispatcher performance. She said that a shortage of 36 call-takers has been reduced to five, and that the agency has hired more call-takers in the past eight months than in all of 2021 and 2022 combined. She acknowledged that there is still an ongoing lack of dispatchers and individuals in supervisory roles, but that this can be solved by part-time hires and promotions, and said that the issue of geographic location – or ensuring that crews are being sent to the proper addresses — is being corrected with training. (She added that due to wireless carriers, location data is only automatically available for about 60% of calls that come in.)

In her testimony, McGaffin also contextualized the agency’s performance within a broader landscape of national issues facing 911 agencies across the country. According to a report from the National Emergency Number Association earlier this summer, 82% of call centers across the nation are understaffed. Meanwhile, across the country and in D.C., the volume of 911 calls has increased; over the past fiscal year it went up nearly 14% in D.C., McGaffin said. She also rebuked allegations from Patterson that the agency was misleading about the progress it had made in fulfilling the auditor’s recommendations from two years ago. Per Patterson, less than a third of the recommendations were adequately fulfilled.

“It’s simply inaccurate,” McGaffin said, adding that as of October 1, OUC has completed 90% of the recommendations. She also mentioned that some of the audit recommendations from 2021 are no longer relevant, as the agency underwent leadership changes over the years.

McGaffin discussed at length the agency’s awareness of the burden of the job, the risk of burnout, and the long shifts that can make retaining employees difficult. The average OUC employee makes $48,000, according to McGaffin. When pressed by Councilmember Zachary Parker whether she would increase the salary of employees, McGaffin wouldn’t provide a clear answer.

Pinto’s upcoming bill that would make the data dashboard permanent is just one of several pieces of legislation before the council aiming to improve OUC operations. Ward 6 Charles Allen has introduced a bill that would provide 911 and 311 call-takers with home-buyer incentives – perks offered to other public safety workers like firefighters and police. On Thursday, ahead of the hearing, At-large Councilmember Robert White introduced a public safety package that called for the creation of a task force to oversee 911 improvements and oversight, fulfilling a demand made by nearly 100 ANC commissioners in a letter last month.

Resident Robert Pittman said the task force is necessary but that it cannot only consist of residents and councilmembers but needs buy-in from the executive government. He suggested OUC develop a “trauma committee,” that goes back to residents after failures and provides answers, so they can begin healing.

“It needs to go back to people and talk to them, there has to be closure for this trauma, we have so much trauma in our communities,” he said.

Filed Under: criminal justice, d.c., district dogs, heather mcgaffin, ouc,