Seattle Police spend $1M+ to revamp 911 center, promise better 911 response times

Seattle, Wash. — After a report in the spring of 2015 revealed problems like busy signals and understaffing at the Seattle Police Department's 911 center, SPD has spent more than $1 million to redesign the center and is sharing plans to spend millions on hiring more employees.

Chief Operating Officer Brian Maxey met exclusively with KIRO 7 at the center to show some of the changes Seattle police say will fix these problems and others.

Mariann Oxford experienced no SPD response when she called about an accident in January. She was driving her Toyota truck on Lake City Way when she says a man ignored the right-turn only sign and darted in front of her.

She smacked into his rear passenger side panel and he started spinning.

“The next thing I know, I’m sitting there looking at him, and he's coming directly at me, wham,” she said.

Oxford was stuck in traffic.

She called the Seattle police 911 center and expected them in minutes.

“That's what I was telling people driving by,” she said. “Police have been called! Any moment they'll be here....nothing.”

A Good Samaritan helped get her truck to the side of the road. Oxford says she smelled alcohol on the other driver's breath. She and another witness kept calling 911 and even convinced the other driver to call himself.

Three and a half hours later, officers had responded to other serious calls in the area, but not hers.

They finally called the Washington State Patrol, which responded instead. Oxford said she never received an apology from police.

“We're sorry that that happened,” Seattle police chief operating officer Brian Maxey said. “It shouldn't.”

Maxey has been overseeing a $1.4 million overhaul of the 911 center and the way dispatchers handle emergency calls.

Most of the money is coming from the state emergency 911 fund, a tax people pay on their phone bills, and about $200,000 is from the city of Seattle.

This March, SPD also updated what it calls its Aggressive Dispatch Policy. Now, dispatchers can send specialty units, like traffic or SWAT, to any waiting priority one incidents, and they have more authority to move officers from other precincts.

“How big of a change is that?” KIRO 7 reporter Linzi Sheldon asked.

“In the modern configuration, this was a pretty significant change,” Maxey said. “The disadvantage, of course, is you're now pulling a resource out of each. You’ve got to be careful. You can't always rob Peter to pay Paul.”

Top commanders will now also be notified if there are priority calls waiting and patrol officers can’t immediately get to the scene.

KIRO 7 requested the data and discovered from January to September of 2015, the average SPD response time for a priority one emergency call was 8.8 minutes. That is just over the previous SPD standard of 7 minutes. For a priority two, it was 31.7 minutes, also over the previous standard of 16 minutes or less.

SPD said those standards are being re-evaluated right now, as well as which calls fall under which priority.

But they say there is progress already.

This year during the same time period, the average response time for a priority one went down to 8 minutes, and for a priority two, it went down to 28.2, even while the number of calls increased.

Maxey said they are working to allow people to report more types of crimes online and are also encouraging dispatchers to communicate what SPD calls “reasonable expectations.”

“In other words, if I know it's going to take eight hours for someone to get you, get to you, then communicate that... not say, 'someone's on the way,’” he said.

“That's a tough proposition to say, ‘Hey, you need to lower your expectations on when a police officer's going to get to you, if at all,’” KIRO  7 reporter Linzi Sheldon said.

“Well, the ‘if at all’ we're hoping we can resolve that one, but there's reality -- you have a certain number of resources, you have increasing calls,” Maxey said.

The city spent $284,000 to hire Don Nagle and his firm, L.R. Kimball, to help improve SPD's 911 system and solve some of the problems his report outlined, including busy signals.

Now, SPD tells us, it's planning to add more lines by essentially integrating the 911 system with Seattle Fire’s so there are more routes a call can take to get to an SPD 911 dispatcher.

Another problem was the center itself; it needed major updating.

Nagle showed KIRO 7 how SPD has installed new consoles and added 14 new positions on the floor. New lights indicate if dispatchers need help. A new, large screen can flip to traffic cameras or news during a major incident or track the calls for supervisors. Supervisors now sit in a raised area at the center of the room so they can see all the disptachers.

“There was only one supervisor [per shift],” Nagle said. “Now we're up to two, soon to be three.”

The mayor is budgeting about a million a year for two years to make 25 more hires, both supervisors and dispatchers. The 911 center has also doubled the size of its training classes.

“So for people who have had bad experiences calling 911 in Seattle, you're saying, it's going to be better,” KIRO 7 reporter Linzi Sheldon said.

“Absolutely,” Maxey said. “This is what it's all about. We're building, redesigning this system from the bottom up.”

Oxford hopes the millions of dollars is money well spent.

“It's not a lot of money if people really get the increased response time that they need, if people are really saved, if they are really protected,” she said. “But are they really going to get the benefit?”

Cox Media Group