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Supervisors Hear Urgent Calls to Fix 911 Staffing as Response Rate Lags
Summary
Supervisors pressed city emergency managers on June 12 after presentations showing San Francisco answered 74.8% of 911 calls within 10 seconds through May, below the 90% national standard; dispatchers and unions urged reclassification, better pay and emergency hiring and retention steps.
Supervisors at a June 12 special meeting of the Board—of—Supervisors—Public Safety & Neighborhood Services Committee pressed city officials to take immediate steps to address a staffing crisis at the city——11 call center that has left response performance well below the national standard.
"There is no more important duty for members of the elected family—... than dealing with public safety," Supervisor Peskin said in opening remarks, framing the hearing after a large increase in calls and a recent PG&E outage that strained dispatch operations. The Office of the Controller and the Department of Emergency Management (DEM) presented data showing call volume has risen roughly 37 percent since 2011 while fully trained dispatcher headcount fell from about 149 to as low as 117 before modest recent hires.
The controller's performance manager, Natasha Mihal, described benchmarking the city against peer jurisdictions and noted the national standard that emergency calls should be answered within 10 seconds 90 percent of the time. "Our call…
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