Austin still looking for more 911 call takers

Austin’s 911 call takers are regularly asked to take on a high call volume, but the Austin Police Department does not have a regular process for expediting call taking when the volume reaches higher-than-normal levels, according to a special report from the Office of the City Auditor. City Council members Vanessa Fuentes and Alison Alter requested a special review and report on the 911 call center last year in response to concerns about long wait times for people in emergency situations.

Fuentes said she understands that when someone calls 911, seconds matter. The report noted that 911 received a higher-than-normal number of calls only about 4 percent of the time, but that APD does not currently have a definition for “high demand” days or times. And 4 percent still equals 30 days out of two years.

Fuentes told the Austin Monitor on Monday that she believes the city needs to define a threshold for those high-demand days.

She also noted that Austin 911 call takers have the second-highest number of calls of the cities studied – including Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, Fort Worth, Denver and Portland, Oregon. Only Denver 911 call takers had a higher volume of calls. Denver and Dallas call takers use an abridged script when volume is high, but Austin does not.

The report notes that other cities, including Portland, are using artificial intelligence during high-demand call events – in response, Fuentes said, “I would definitely want to explore what that would look like.” In addition, although the city has increased the number of call takers by raising salaries and promoting the job, vacancies still remain.

“At the time of the special request, APD had 104 call takers and 75 dispatchers budgeted. However, APD has numerous vacancies. APD’s past standards called for a minimum of 14 employees on duty for call taking. The standards were lowered to a minimum of six employees on duty to reduce overtime and staff burnout. … When six call takers are assigned to a shift, Austin has the highest number of calls per call taker, 408 calls per call taker, second only to Denver’s 445 calls per call taker,” according to the report. Additionally, the report notes that APD adds additional staff, including teletype operators and nonemergency call takers, to the base so they have sufficient numbers to allow staff to take breaks.

The Austin Monitor asked APD for the current number of call takers on Monday and an APD spokesperson reported, “A class of three just started, so that puts us down to 20 call center vacancies out of 104.” This is considerably better than what was reported last October.

The national standard for answering 911 calls says that 90 percent of calls should be answered in 15 seconds or less. According to the auditors’ report, the percentage of calls that Austin’s call center answered within 15 seconds or less dropped from a high of 93 percent in November 2021 to an average of 77 percent in 2022 and 2023.

According to the report, 50 percent of calls were answered within 15 seconds on January 1, 2023. However, almost a quarter of callers waited two minutes or longer. On February 1, 2023, 76 percent of calls were answered within 15 seconds. However, on April 20, 2023, when there was an unexpectedly high call volume, almost 25 percent of callers waited for two minutes or more. There was no explanation for the increased volume on that day, but calls spiked again on June 17, 2023. Although more than half of the calls were answered within 15 seconds, almost one-quarter of callers waited for two minutes or longer.

Auditors noted, “Longer wait times mean callers wait longer to reach a call taker, which adds time to the initial part of the dispatch process. Callers on hold may hang up completely or hang up and redial 911 to try to get ahead in the queue. As call volumes increased, so did the percentage of calls where people hung up before their call was answered.”

According to The Denver Gazette, “Looking at call volume, Denver tries to answer 90% of all 911 calls within 10 seconds and 95 percent within 20 seconds. Denver 911’s service levels dropped out of this range while struggling with staffing losses throughout the summer of 2021.”

The Monitor asked Fuentes, who serves on the Council Audit and Finance Committee, whether she thought the report would be discussed at an upcoming meeting of the committee. She said it was an important topic, but she didn’t know whether it would appear on a future agenda.

Photo made available through a Creative Commons license.

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