We're still waiting

This just gets worse and worse, doesn't it? I don't even know what to say:

The notorious 911 call from Brittany Zimmermann's cell phone the day she died carried the sounds of a woman's screams and a struggle, according to long-sealed search warrants obtained by the Wisconsin State Journal.

The warrants were only unsealed because of time - officials had asked judges to continue resealing them, but the most recent expiration date was allowed to pass unchallenged. Maybe that was the easiest way for them to release this information. Passively.

Whatever the case, we can all now see one of the likely main reasons why officials didn't want this stuff out in public: it makes them look really, really bad.

Still, many questions remain unanswered. Why, if there was audible screaming and struggling on the call, did the trained dispatcher claim not to hear anything (as according to her and to former 911 director Joe Norwick)? And why didn't she follow up on the call, as procedure dictated? 48 minutes then passed between the call being made and police being dispatched to the apartment, presumably only because Zimmermann's fiance had by that point also made a 911 call.

I recognize that it's unlikely much could have been done to actually save Brittany's life. But it is very much worth our while to question what might have been done differently so that her killer could have been caught and brought to justice long ago. There's always a better chance of that if police are dispatched immediately. But they weren't, and the perpetrator remains at large.

And the 911 center? Still having issues, even after all of this. Although they were much quicker to release information on what went wrong afterward, their handling of the calls leading up to the beating death of a man in Lake View Park in November was also very poor. Negligent, even.

Yet Kathleen Falk still insists that "problems at the 911 Center have been overblown. The facility, she maintains, has been well managed and adequately staffed."

I don't place all of the blame for these problems on Falk's management, or on any one person for that matter. But her continued dismissals of, in my mind, perfectly valid concerns over 911 center performance do nothing to bolster her position. They make her seem out of touch and unconcerned with the very real problems faced by the center and the community it serves. It certainly won't solve everything, but having an executive willing to really confront these issues head-on would definitely be helpful.

Upgrading 911 center software and equipment is important, but so is making sure there are adequate staffing levels (and training) so that no one is forced into heavy overtime. Hiring an experienced, accountable center director would be a good start, too.

All of this is not to say that I'm endorsing Nancy Mistele's run for Falk's office. Frankly, she strikes me as an even worse choice for the job. But that won't keep me from calling for accountability from Falk and everyone else involved.

Who you gonna call?

I am losing patience with County Executive Kathleen Falk and with the boards that manage our 911 center. It seems as though no matter how many expensive studies resulting in admonitions to immediately add more staff are conducted, proper measures just are not taken. Or they are, but only after protracted foot dragging.

And more mistakes--mistakes with terrible consequences--are made.

Case-in-point: the recent failure of a 911 operator to dispatch police to the scene of not one, but two noise complaints. Just over an hour later, a man was found beaten to death in the area from where the complaints originated.

Not to play too much of a game of "if only," but it strikes me (and many others, I'm sure) that this death could have been avoided, and perhaps the perpetrator in the Zimmermann case apprehended, if the county had simply followed the recommendations of the intial report from back in 2004. Instead, it's 2008 and the center still hasn't implemented the necessary policy changes and increased staffing levels necessary to properly handle calls.

It's difficult to expect the public to have complete trust in the system with results like these.

The resignation of former 911 center director Joe Norwick was all well-and-good, but we need additions, not subtractions: more staff, better training, clearer procedural policies. And we need Falk to face the issues honestly, without sugarcoating. None of this "Falk said the report confirmed that the county is on the right track by adding the staff she included in her budget to address overtime" crap.

I understand the need to make yourself and the county look good to the public, but seriously, own up. We may be on the "right track" but we still haven't done everything we could have and should have. Is it a matter of not having enough money for all of the needed positions? Then say so! We can better address problems if we know what they actually are. Don't dance around the issue by boasting about adding only half of the recommended positions. Asking for upgraded software is good, but it's not enough.

And don't just continue to ask for more studies. We've already been given several similar recommendations. We know what to do. Now it's just a matter of actually, y'know, doing it.

For the resortation of trust in the dispatch system, and for the safety of the community.

Shaking it up at the 911 center

Lots of news about the Dane County 911 center this week, both as reported by the WSJ.

First, Kathleen Falk and Joe Norwick's budget priorities are shot down by the center's own board:

Falk has proposed borrowing $163,000 next year to buy police dispatch software that would allow 911 operators to get more information from callers, send the optimal police resources and improve quality control checks on police calls.

But the 911 board, which advises the 911 director on budget matters, voted 8-1 to remove the software from next year's budget proposal and spend the money instead on replacing the center's outdated computer dispatch system.

Second, Norwick resigns, this coming months after his resignation was originally called for over his less-than stellar handling of the Brittany Zimmermann case.

From my outsider's perspective, it's obviously difficult to figure out exactly what's going on. I can only hope that, whatever comes of all this shakin' up, it does something to improve the way in which our 911 center handles calls, and to improve the working conditions for those dispatchers.

Judging by these two articles, though, it would appear that there are some serious differences of opinion and priority between the center's board and the county leadership, namely Falk and Norwick. To be fair, after Falk first proposed borrowing money to upgrade the dispatch system, she agreed to add a plan to borrow money for upgrading the actual computers used in the center once concerns were raised by the board about the aging infrastructure.

So why not do both?

Norwick said the center is already taking on other major projects next year including a new $30 million countywide radio system, a redesign of the 911 center that will increase the number of consoles from 13 to 18 and the addition of nine more staff.

"To complete a (computer system assessment) is going to be tough enough," Norwick said.

Maybe his resignation, and the subsequent hiring of a (hopefully) more qualified director, will lead to a different response to this issue, something like "It's going to be tough, but we'll do it because it's important."

UPDATE TO ADD: I almost completely missed this story from Isthmus and dogged reporter Jason Shepard regarding the center oversight board's failure to do performance evaluations on Norwick. D'oh.

Not required to rescue

This is interesting:

A federal civil rights lawsuit filed against Dane County and a former 911 dispatcher by the parents of homicide victim Brittany Zimmermann should be dismissed because the county has no constitutional obligation to protect individuals from the acts of others, a response to the lawsuit states.

...

According to the brief for the dismissal motion, the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals has said the U.S. Constitution "does not require municipalities to rescue persons in distress." Further, the court said negligence or gross negligence "cannot be the basis for a constitutional violation."

I'm about as far as you can get from being a Constitutional scholar, but my gut is telling me two things here: 1) that the county may be right in that the Constitution does not require governments to provide competent rescue services to its citizens, but that 2) regardless of what has been established by the court, this is a shitty, shitty thing for the county (or any government) to say.

Perhaps the federal lawsuit wasn't the correct course of action for the parents to take in this case, but I think it's pretty clear that serious mistakes were made by both the 911 center and the county officials who dealt with the press and the aftermath. And though nothing can change what happened or make Brittany Zimmermann's parents feel much better, it does seem like some sort of lawsuit is in order here.

It should be a bit of a wake-up call for all of us, though, to read that Dane County doesn't believe it has any real obligation to provide emergency services to its citizens. And if it does deign to provide them, it needn't do so "competently." There is something very wrong with that mentality. If citizens weren't contributing anything to the government--no taxes, no votes, etc.--then this might make more sense. As it stands, though, it's far from comforting to know that the county has so little regard for our safety.


h/t: mal contends at Uppity Wisconsin

UPDATE: On a related note, this potentially intriguing bit of news just popped up on TCT regarding a possible connection between a man recently arrested on kidnapping and sexual assault charges, and the murder of Brittany Zimmermann.

Improvements in 911 equipment, but what about cell phones?

The Capital Times is reporting that County Board Supervisor Brett Hulsey claims that the Dane County 911 Center "has added one communicator and one communications supervisor, so the center is now fully staffed with 12 people. More equipment is planned as part of a $30 million investment the county is making in the public safety communications system."

That's good news.

What Hulsey doesn't indicate is whether or not these additions and improvements yet meet the guidelines set forth in the '04 report of the center by an outside consultant. Perhaps even more importantly, the public still hasn't gotten a straight, honest answer when it comes to the center's ability to track cell phone calls.

Apparently, the federal mandate is that they should be able to "find a caller's location within an area 200 feet by 100 feet from the actual location." What we've heard from various Dane County officials, however, varies wildly enough that anyone paying attention would be disinclined to ever again use a cell phone for emergency purposes.

This is all made even more interesting by the recent attention being paid to privacy issues with regards to cell phones. Service providers are required to provide real-time tracking data to any Public Safety Answering Point (or PSAP) within 6 months of the request being made. This same information has often been sought by federal authorities wishing to get the real-time location of alleged drug traffickers, fugitives and other criminals, sometimes without demonstrating probable cause. That's a whole other issue, and one worthy of much scrutiny and skepticism, but it also brings up some issues relevant to the Zimmermann case. If such pinpointing technology exists and its use is federally mandated in the case of emergency services, why isn't it being used to guarantee follow-up calls and police dispatching to the origin of the call (as is currently the case with calls made from landlines)?

An entity called "Dane County Public Safety Communications" is officially registered with the federal government as one such PSAP. That would suggest their compliance with federal E911 regulations, and the ability to pinpoint the location of a cell phone (as was done in the Kelly Nolan case, with a cell phone that wasn't even making a call, which also has not yet been explained).

So what's the truth? Do we have the ability to locate cell phones in a reasonably accurate fashion, but just fucked up in this case? Or are we lying about our emergency service's capabilities, something that might well put us in violation of federal regulations? Neither option is particularly appealing, and I'd love for both to be wrong. But until we're given a straight answer, there's only speculation and a creeping feeling that we're not being as well-taken care of as we ought to be.