When residents of a community call 911 for an emergency, they’re inclined to anticipate an extremely speedy reaction to their emergency.  

But according to an October 8 performance audit in the City of Oakland, CA, “We found that the Police Emergency Communications Center within the Police Department has struggled to meet state targets for 9-1-1 call answering speeds . . . In 2024, Oakland answered 54 percent of calls within 15 seconds and 57 percent of calls within 20 seconds, with nearly a third of calls waiting more than 60 seconds to be answered.”  California state performance targets require local 911 centers to answer 90 percent of calls within 15 seconds and 95 percent within 20 seconds.

What to do? The auditor has come up with ten recommendations for the Police Department and its Communications Division, which can also be adapted in other cities with 911 delays. Several of them specifically address the problem of responding to 911 calls in a multilingual city. As the report points out, “The disadvantages of using an interpreter are compounded by delays in dispatch and overall response times . . . Using interpreters can also delay response times for other calls in the queue.”

Following are the report’s ten recommendations. (The first four are aimed at the Police Communications Division and the rest at the Police Department as a whole)

• “Adjust minimum staffing to reflect call volume, using the staffing recommendations from the state’s Emergency Call Tracking System (ECaTS) as guidance. As part of this, the Division needs to revisit the current shift structure and adjust as needed to ensure that schedules reflect call volume and staffing needs to achieve state 9-1-1 call answering targets.

• “Establish a practice of letting callers know when their incident has been referred to dispatch.”

• “Develop a plan to maximize hourly coverage of bilingual dispatchers.

• “Adjust its target for bilingual dispatchers (based on regular assessments required by the City’s Administrative Instruction 145) towards an equivalent level of service for emergency calls in languages spoken by limited English speakers with more than 10,000 residents. 

• “Update its policies to reflect existing and/or best practices in language accessibility, such as its current practice of prioritizing use of bilingual dispatchers over third-party interpreters, as well as streamlining the transfer of interpreted calls to the Fire Department so that interpreters are not dropped, and informing officers or police service technicians when they are responding to calls involving limited English speakers.

• “Analyze and report its progress towards the City’s policy goal of providing the same level of service for limited English-speaking populations to an appropriate oversight body, such as the City Council’s Public Safety Committee. These reports should include the number of 9-1-1 calls from limited English speakers by language and call response times compared to other calls. 

• “Translate the initial greeting of the Department’s non-emergency phone tree into threshold languages as defined by the Equal Access to Services Ordinance.

• “Adopt targets for each stage of its response times, set a process to revisit these targets as needed, and regularly report on its performance.

• “Update beat boundaries, considering factors such as call volume, call types (e.g., calls involving violence) and priorities, and officer and supervisory capacity.

• “Activate GPS in its patrol cars to enable dispatchers to dispatch the nearest officer to an incident to minimize travel times. This recommendation may be subject to meet and confer.”

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