911 Supervisor Seeks To Restore Public Trust

Responding to a barrage of complaints, a 17-year veteran of New Haven’s 911 call center told Westville neighbors the public has been heard — and enlisted their help.

Nikki Britton (pictured above), chief supervisor of dispatchers at the call center (officially known as the Public Service Answering Point, or PSAP), brought that message to the monthly meeting of the Westville/West Hills Community Management Team at Mauro-Sheridan School.

She said she wanted the neighbors to know first of all that she cares about their safety and well-being and that if they have a problem with a dispatcher, they can call her and speak to her directly. She promised to investigate the call personally, and if warranted, take corrective action with the dispatcher.

“I’m here to represent my department and to let you know that we do care about you, so please don’t think that we don’t,” she said. ​“We’re not perfect. We have employees that have a bad day, and that’s not to say that you are supposed to catch the heat from that, but I just want to let you know that we are here to serve you. That’s what we do. That’s our job. We take your information, we enter it into the computer, we dispatch it, we send you officers.”

Britton, who has been a dispatch supervisor for about five of her 17 years at the center, has a reputation for being able to handle any kind of call. (Read here about how she helped talk former alder and mayoral candidate Justin Elicker and his wife Natalie through the unexpected home delivery of their daughter, Molly, nearly a year ago.)

The communications department, which handles between 4,000 and 5,000 calls a week, has come under fire lately over problems ranging from response times on emergency calls and perceived lack of dispatcher professionalism to overtime issues and inaccurate reporting of crime statistics. (Read about the problems here, here, here and here.)

How Could This Happen?

Neighbors wasted no time peppering Britton with questions at the meeting, which took place last Wednesday night.

One neighbor asked Britton why it took so long for an officer to be dispatched to a call to his house, after his alarm had gone off, and why that officer was subsequently called off when he or she was on the way. Britton said she’d have to review that specific call, but she gave an example of how such a scenario could have happened based on recent events.

“This morning, we had a caller who waited for almost an hour for a theft complaint,” Britton explained. “[Tuesday] night we had a shooting. We also had an infant death, and that kind of depleted most of the officers that we had on third shift. But like I said we believe [in] people over property. Not that your alarm going off isn’t important. If we have to we can pull an officer, but at the same time we also have to triage every call we get. I don’t know your particular situation, I will research the incident.”

Britton said she wanted anyone who has a bad experience with a call taker to call her on her cell phone and tell her what happened.

“I don’t tolerate any of the call takers being rude to people — at all,” she said. ​“I’ve written up several people. I don’t have a problem writing up people after I have listened to the call. We give them retraining.”

She also assured the crowd that that for certain kinds of calls — someone breaking into their house while they’re home, someone attempting suicide, or suffering injuries — a dispatcher will stay on the phone until help arrives.

“We don’t get off the phone with them,” she said. ​“That’s a no-no.”

What’s Being Done?

Upper Westville resident Susan St. George said she had an incident last year involving a break-in while her elderly mother was home.

Her mother’s aide called 911 and told the dispatcher that someone was attempting to break in to the home. The dispatcher classified the call as a suspicious person, she recalled. ​“The police did not arrive for another 35 to 45 minutes, and the dispatcher told us that they didn’t send the police because it was during a shift change,” she said. ​“So the issue I have is there are a lot of quality control problems in this whole process, and the idea of having a centralized dispatch may not work in all the cases. So what is the city planning to do to rectify this issue? Obviously, this hasn’t been fixed. These are still going on. What is the game plan of trying to get this resolved? Do we need to go to the mayor? Do we need to have an open inquiry? Do we need to go to the media?”

Britton said that the reality is that the city does see a dip in its police coverage during shift changes. She said there was a time when officers worked a ​“changeover” shift to help beef up police resources when shifts changed, but that doesn’t happen any more.

“During a shift change it is very possible that you would have to wait for an officer because you only have those officers that are left on the street from the shift,” she said.

Westville’s top cop, Sgt. Renee Dominguez, said that shifts are overlapped to help alleviate that. For instance, on the evening shift, some officers work from 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. and others work 4 p.m to midnight. ​“But it is not always 100 percent perfect,” she said.

Dominguez, pointing to a recent meeting between her, PSAP Director Michael Briscoe, city Chief Administrative Officer Michael Carter and Westville alders, encouraged neighbors to keep making their voices heard.

“These complaints are not falling on deaf ears,” she said. ​“We are trying to do something to make everybody see on the PSAP side and the police side because it’s just something we can’t let go. So your complaints — don’t ever stop.”

Alder Adam Marchand (pictured) said that the area’s alders continue to meet with city officials about PSAP responsiveness and have another meeting with Briscoe coming up.“Rest assured we’ve heard you loud and clear,” he said to residents Wednesday night. ​“This is an area of great interest for all of you and an area of interest for us. As policy makers we are educating ourselves. I can’t make policy if I don’t understand what the operation is now. We are educating ourselves so that we can recommend how to make it better.”

Britton said internally PSAP has started a community relations committee. ​“We all have one goal, and that’s to give the best service possible,” she said. ​“We want to see how we can improve our relationship with the community and put back that confidence in the community that the dispatchers that work for the City of New Haven care, and we want you to know it.”

How Does This Work?

Following are some other questions and answers from the meeting.

Q: How many systems are involved in the process of dispatching a call?

Britton: If you call from a cell phone, your cell phone call goes to whatever tower is in you area. Yours would be on West Rock. Your call goes to the West Rock tower; your call goes to the state police; then they funnel your call to wherever — if you’re in New Haven you get us. If you’re in Westville once in a while your call goes to West Haven; I explained that to people the last time. But it comes into our center and then when you call, the dispatcher says, ​“911. What’s the address of your emergency?” We get your address so that first and foremost, no matter what you have, you get help to where you are. Then we funnel to either police, fire or EMS.

Once it comes into the phone system, we enter it into the CAD [computer] system. If you say, ​“I’m calling about a car accident at Whalley and Central.” The call goes into the computer. The call taker types it in. We ask, ​“Are there any injuries?” You say, ​“Yes there are injuries.” So first, the dispatcher enters the call. When we enter the code that comes in — a motor vehicle accident with injuries as opposed to no injuries — it automatically generates a call to the police dispatcher, goes on to the police dispatcher’s screen, then it goes to the fire dispatcher who dispatches the ambulance and the fire department.

Q: Is there any lag time from time you put a call in to the time it appears on a dispatchers screen?

Britton: Seconds. It should be seconds. It’s designed to be seconds. For different calls we have different times for when they should be dispatched. So it depends on what calls are holding. It depends on what type of call it is. If you have a car blocking your driveway, versus [a call that] there is somebody getting robbed? Your parking complaint is going to wait. It has to. We only have a certain amount of officers and the resources aren’t there to take everyone’s call right then and there.

Q: Is the computer making that judgment? Is it prioritizing things based on the codes?

Yes. The computer makes it and also the dispatcher does. We have a motto: People over property. So it’s important that your house is getting robbed, but it’s also important if someone is in a car accident and is hurt.

Q:When it goes on the dispatcher’s screen? What happens?

Britton: A dispatcher pulls an officer from Westville. If there’s not an officer from Westville available, the dispatcher looks at the surrounding districts and pull someone from there. If they don’t have anyone they pull from anywhere depending on what the incident is. If priority one, they come from anywhere. If there is no patrol officer, then a sergeant is sent, someone gets sent even all the way up to the chief.

Q:And the calls that come up through the non-emergency number? How are they handled?

Britton: They get prioritized as well. It still goes in the same way. It still goes to a dispatcher.

Click on the above sound file to hear a dispatcher’s controversial handling of a May 26 call about a suicidal student at the Taft apartments. Read more about that here.