As a community pastor at Peace Fellowship Church in Northeast, Michael Campbell often assists District residents who are enduring difficult situations. Such on-the-job experience, Campbell said, qualifies him for employment with the Office of Unified Communications (OUC).
In August, Campbell applied for one of OUC’s 20 open 911 call taker slots. He told The Informer he did so, not because of the $2,500 hiring bonus or the potential one-year salary increase, but out of a moral obligation to ensure that people’s emergency calls get handled in a timely manner.
“I see myself being a reliable employee who’s skilled at helping others through traumatic experiences,” Campbell, who’s also host of the online program “The People’s Voice,” told The Informer.
“The current state of our system is unsatisfactory, and even dangerous for our residents. It can be argued that OUC is responsible for more than one death in our great city. If people have the ability, heart and desire to help, they should apply to be the change that OUC needs.”
D.C. Councilmember Brooke Pinto Pledges to Increase Oversight
OUC’s efforts to fill personnel gaps come amid ongoing concerns among residents and elected officials about the agency’s ability to effectively respond to emergency calls.
In the aftermath of technical issues that led to the death of a five-month-old baby in early August, D.C. Councilmember Brooke Pinto (D-Ward 2), chair of the council’s Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety also expressed concerns.
On Sept. 9, she conducted a tour of OUC headquarters, one of several she said will take place this fall in conjunction with monthly council committee oversight hearings.
“More oversight needs to happen,” Pinto told reporters shortly after her tour. “In my role as chair of [the council’s Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety], I am focused on a robust oversight schedule to get to the bottom of those incidents and make sure our tech upgrades are where they need to be.”
Those oversight hearings, she said, will bring OUC Director Heather McGaffin to the John A. Wilson Building, along with Lindsey Appiah, deputy mayor for public safety and justice, along with officials from the Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO), Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency, and other agencies that are relevant to the District’s emergency response infrastructure.
Pinto’s recent tour of OUC, she said, included a viewing of a training session and conversations with personnel who expressed their frustration about lax federal enforcement that prevents OUC from gathering accurate geographic information for some local establishments.
When it comes to 911 call taker recruitment, Pinto said that, besides drumming up interest among prospective call takers, there’s also the issue of background checks and onboarding. She also expressed a qualm about 911 call takers not having federal designation as first responders, as is the case with fire and emergency medical personnel.
As it relates to transparency around time lapse between 911 calls and the dispatch of emergency medical personnel, Pinto said that OUC officials told her they are on track to have that data available by Oct. 1, the beginning of the 2025 fiscal year. By that time, Pinto’s newest legislation to increase transparency would be in the throes of the legislative process.
Pinto’s bill, titled “Transparency in Emergency Response Amendment Act, will build upon provisions of emergency legislation, and later the Secure DC Omnibus bill, that mandate the launch of a daily dashboard showing the frequency of OUC errors, staffing ratios, and other information.
If passed, OUC would be required to release an after-action report 45 days after a serious injury or death believed to be caused by the agency’s errors. The bill also requires release of the computer-aided dispatch (CAD) report, transcripts, recordings of 911 calls and other documents highlighting possible errors and concerns surrounding 911 calls.
“When it comes to the after-action report, there’s a benefit for government agencies. I hope this will be a collaborative report,” Pinto told reporters outside of OUC headquarters on Martin Luther King, Jr. Avenue on Aug. 9.
Ensuring she knows what’s happening with OUC is key for Pinto.
“I’m focused on transparency and rigorous, continuous oversight,” Pinto continued. “Visiting OUC every other week and doing it unannounced leads to a transparent process. I worked hard to collaborate with the agency directors I have jurisdiction over but we have to see more. I plan to work with OUC Director [Heather] McGaffin to make sure improvements are where they need to be.”
A Deeper Look at OUC Tech Mishaps, and What Adjustments are to Come
An internal investigation conducted by the Office of the Chief Technology Officer after the Aug. 2 death of a five-month-old baby found 18 disruptions to CAD since last December.
Eight of those disruptions, City Administrator Kevin Donahue said, happened across the entire CAD system. In regard to the disruption that delayed the response to the baby’s medical emergency, Donahue pointed to an OCTO contractor who erroneously implemented a system update that overwhelmed, and ultimately shut down, CAD for several minutes.
Days after the baby’s death, family members told news outlets that their 911 call went unanswered for several minutes. As NBC 4’s I-team later reported, family members ran outside their home on Connecticut Avenue in Northwest and tracked down a federal agent who performed CPR on the baby until fire and emergency medical services arrived on the scene.
According to a timeline shared by Donahue, the family’s 911 call eventually went through with OUC having to conduct manual dispatch to fire and emergency medical personnel during CAD’s multi-hour system outage. Due to the manual dispatch’s relatively slower status updates, OUC dispatched the call to units that just so happened to be at the scene of another emergency.
Donahue explained how the manual dispatch, unlike CAD, doesn’t provide the most timely updates about the availability of units.
“The most challenging part of manual dispatching is the first few minutes… when Fire and Emergency Medical Services does a roll call [by radio] of the different units under its purview… to confirm who’s available for dispatch or not,” Donahue said. “They update that roll call periodically. The vulnerability is that the roll call takes a few minutes. When you’re doing it, how do you know what’s available?”
The OUC and OCTO have since compiled and implemented a 22-step action plan that focuses on changing protocol and replacing CAD equipment. The goal, as explained in a report, centers on a 75% reduction in 911 call delays within a three-month period.
The steps, to be carried out in collaboration with the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Public Safety and Justice and Metropolitan Police Department, Fire & Emergency Medical Services, among other agencies, include: increase the training and providing certifications for IT professionals working on the 911 dispatch system; system changes to be made overnight, in a simulation environment and with the approval of OUC and OCTO; the inclusion of a third party to monitor systems and alert at the first sign of trouble; purchase of additional equipment for OCTO’s network infrastructure; breaking the OUC infrastructure into two smaller entities with different locations; and the close monitoring of increased workload at OUC to ensure that hardware and infrastructure keep pace.
Donahue explained the action steps more plainly.
“One of the action steps in the 22-point plan around addressing the outage [while] 21 of them talk about the stability of the IT system,” Donahue told The Informer. “One of them speaks to the process to address the circumstance that arose that day: how to make sure who you dispatched using that CAD snapshot is indeed available. How to get that affirmative confirmation.’
Donahue also shared an aspect of the problem and how the city is working to provide immediate solutions.
“Very often it’s not CAD, but people and other applications trying to connect to CAD, which makes it unstable. So we’re replacing the equipment it uses,” he explained. “It wouldn’t start until October, but we advanced the money to start immediately.”
An Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner Weighs In
For years, D.C. residents have complained about unanswered 911 phone calls and long wait times for emergency assistance. In 2022, Aujah Griffin accused OUC of having a lack of urgency around her father’s erratic behavior preceding his deadly dive into the Washington Channel.
Last year, OUC’s lack of a dispatch code, in part, delayed a response to District Dogs in Northeast during a flood that ultimately killed 10 dogs. That situation compelled dozens of former and current advisory neighborhood commissioners to sign a petition demanding, among other things, the release of staffing data, publication of 911 call transcripts, and the launch of an independent 911 task force.
Kimberly Martin, one of those commissioners, said she welcomed Pinto’s latest attempt to hold OUC accountable to self-improvement. Martin said that, as recently as last month, she struggled to get a police officer to Southern Avenue where a constituent experienced car trouble kept her vehicle stuck in the middle of the street.
As she nears the end of her second term, Martin told The Informer that she continues to hear from seniors who are frustrated with the status quo.
“If it’s not a matter of somebody being shot, there’s always a delayed response. That doesn’t sit well with my elderly constituents,” said Martin, commissioner of Single-Member District 7C08, which includes the Capitol View neighborhood.
As it relates to Pinto’s legislation, Martin said that, for the time being, it proves as an adequate response, especially due to what she described as the council’s lack of communication to her and other members of her commission.
“I’m expecting some legislation to hold OUC accountable, and maybe cut their budget if need be,” Martin said. “People want to feel safe where they live. OUC should answer the phone immediately [because] you never know what the emergency could be.”