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Supervisors press 911 and police on language access after Good Orchard Bakery delay
Summary
Supervisors and community advocates probed the city’s 911 and police response after a January robbery at Good Orchard Bakery in which a monolingual Chinese victim waited hours for in-person responders; DEM and SFPD pledged data reviews, coding changes and stepped-up outreach to bilingual communities.
San Francisco supervisors and community advocates on Thursday pressed the Department of Emergency Management and the Police Department to explain a breakdown in language-access and response that followed a Jan. 19 robbery at Good Orchard Bakery in District 11.
Supervisor Asha Safaie, who cosponsored the hearing, said the bakery owner (who asked not to be identified) was assaulted and called 911 but, despite asking for a Chinese interpreter, waited hours for responders. "An interpreter was handed over, but a DEM staffer was not available at the time," Safaie said, adding that the delay — which she described as more than four hours — had eroded trust in emergency services among monolingual immigrant communities.
The context: the Department of Emergency Management (DEM) said its combined public-safety dispatch center handles roughly 1.3 million calls a year — about 3,800 calls a day — and that about 1.4 percent of those calls (roughly…
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