911 operator convicted after hanging up on thousands of callers. 10 days in jail while people died.
StG
She has time now
I understand the feeling but this is obviously not ok. It is a part of the job that you get calls from anyone in the community and sometimes it can wear you down. That’s what vacaions are for. But just hanging up on callers is never ok. Every call has to be screened. Even if the caller is drunk, angry, scared, yelling, crying, panicked, mentally ill, helpful, uncooperative, or whatever.
Then based upon that screening maybe some calls do not require dispatch or follow up, but it is absolutely mandatory that every call be properly handled - even the two thirds of calls that are not true emergencies.
Maybe just a case of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, but this is the fourth example of 911 failure that I’ve heard about in the past week. There was a woman who drowned in her car when the 911 operator couldn’t figure out her location, the teenager who was crushed by his car seat when the 911 operator apparently ignored details he had given her, and an overpass collapse (from several years ago - the story was referenced during the recent collapse) that was called in as a danger by a motorist before it happened, but incorrectly reported by the operator.
I’m starting to feel like 911 may not be as helpful in an emergency as we have been led to believe. Clearly some retraining is necessary, although of course these are the outlying cases, and there are plenty of instances in which 911 operators do a good job and save lives.
…scapegoat for a broken system…
Yeaaaaaah. :rolleyes:
Right. She’s one of the ones breaking it.
Allow me to present a document representing a summarized finding of facts in this matter, delivered in the vernacular of the communities represented. Also it’s a great tune.
Joking aside, what I don’t get is how (based on my limited knowledge of how a 911 call center works) a person who had that many hangups didn’t get noticed. Did no one hear her calls? Monitor the recordings periodically? Notice the statistics? The article said that call durations appeared as an anomaly in an audit, but that was a year and a half later!
A supervisor should have observed this operator had too many abrupt hangups.
Calls are logged. They should be supervising these workers.
Her supervisor was put on a year’s probation. Work probation, not criminal.
The thing is, I know from my own company’s phone system that reports can be generated for each user that should point this out, if someone’s looking at them. For our sales and C/S folks, part of their job metrics are tied into how many inbound and outbound calls are taken, and the average duration of those calls. It’s reviewed monthly for each person. I built the reporting tool for the metrics.
StG
From the article:
“Williams had started working as a dispatcher in July 2014 and had taken thousands of calls, court documents say. But an audit a year and a half after she was hired found that an abnormally large number of her calls had lasted 20 seconds or less, and the city began an investigation.”
So she starts work July 2014, the city found a problem ~Jan 2016 and the investigation was still ongoing five months later when the robbery occurred and the man died.
So they had auditing procedures in place, they used them and discovered a problem, and then? Nope. If this were a regular office job I could see four months or so of re-training, write ups, etc. But THIS on a 911 system? Should be immediate removal to a non-critical position.