Non-emergency 911 calls a concern
By John Joyce
Published in News on January 25, 2015 1:50 AM
sherring@newsargus.com
It would be impossible to eliminate all non-emergency calls that tie up Wayne County's 911 system, county commissioners learned this past week.
Commissioners ordered a study of the emergency communication system, and the consulting firm tasked with the job gave its report Tuesday.
The presentation of the needs assessment study of the center had been expected to take about 10 minutes. Instead it took nearly 30 minutes, with much of the discussion focused on abandoned, misdialed and service calls.
"The center is busiest from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. when it is very possible every dispatcher could be taking phone calls," said Louisa Lake, a public safety consultant with Mission Critical Partners, the firm hired by the county to conduct the study. "If so, they can't be dispatching a call for service. In a center this size, it is unusual that there is not one person dedicated to (service) call taking.
"Unfortunately, the county has a very high abandoned call rate. It is higher than the national average. Your abandoned call rate averages about 17 percent. That means 17 calls of 100 coming in, the person is either hanging up before he gets the answer, realize they have misdialed and hangs up."
According to records from 2013, the E911 center day shift had 18,095 abandoned calls and night shift 9,013.
Hang-ups are called back to ensure that the call was a mistake and not a case in which something had happened to someone trying to make an emergency call.
Commissioner Ed Cromartie asked if there is any way to determine if the number of abandoned calls increased after the telephone company started requiring people in the 919 area code to dial the area code, even if it is a local number.
Cromartie said he had misdialed 919 as 911 and had learned to stay on the phone to let the dispatcher know it was an error.
Ms. Lake agreed that can tie up dispatchers, and that a lot of abandoned calls are the result of misdials.
But it is difficult to determine how many were caused by misdialing 919 because that is not information that is normally tracked, she said.
Commissioner Joe Daughtery said his source of information in the E911 center told him that misdials actually account for 30 percent of the call volume.
"I am not sure who you are getting your information from, but I would dare go on record and say that is absolutely untrue," Fire Marshal Bryan Taylor said.
"But what I am saying is that we need to track it," Daughtery said.
Manual tracking is the only way to do that, Taylor said. The county might be able to get a "rough" figure, but it will be "nowhere near exact," he said.
Commissioner Joe Gurley asked if the 17 percent could be broken down to determine if the calls were made by wireless or wired phones.
Ms. Lake said she does not believe that is possible with the county's current system.
Commissioner Ray Mayo asked if technology exists to allow the center to screen calls to see where they are coming from.
"You are at least going to have to answer it to see what they want," County Manager George Wood said.
Taylor said the center can tell the number of incoming and outgoing calls, but cannot say it is getting "500 calls a year from the city public works department."
It might be possible to survey calls over a month and extrapolate from there, Wood said.
"Once we have that data, we can look and see if we need to change some of our policies," he said.
An operational issue that needs to be addressed is that law enforcement is using the main line to run ancillary information, such as license checks, Ms. Lake said. That ties up the main line and a dispatcher's time, she said. A dedicated line is needed for those calls.
County Facilities Director Milford Smith already has reduced the calls going to his department that used to end up in the E911 call center by using a dedicated line, Wood noted.
"To me, if other agencies are giving out our 911 (non-emergency) number for water or sewer problems, things after hours, drainage problems whatever -- we can put a stop to that," Wood said. "We can make it clear to the agency we no longer will answer those. We will answer them, but our answer is going to be, 'You need to call the public works department and 911 does not handle those calls any more.'"
The system was not established to take administrative calls or to serve as an answering service, Wood said.
"If you are going to tie up our people we are going to need to charge for that," he said.
Commissioner Joe Daughtery said the call center is being abused and was not designed to handle after-hour water calls, he said.
Some larger cities have 311 centers that people can call for general information, Ms. Lake said. Other cities use their 911 centers for that but "staff appropriately," she said.
Phillip Penny, business development specialist with Mission Critical Partners, urged commissioners to keep in mind as they attempt to educate people about when to call 911 that what might not be an emergency to them could be to someone else.
"It is a real slippery slope when you start telling people here is what you can or you can't call for," he said. "What you want to do is take those calls and process them as quickly as you can and move them on. But to totally eliminate those calls, it is just not going to happen."