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lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial
ARTICLE VIEW:
Five years after a tragic DC 911 misfire, America’s emergency
dispatch systems are still overwhelmed and underfunded
By Danya Gainor, CNN
Updated:
6:30 AM EDT, Sun August 24, 2025
Source: CNN
Billie Shepperd was planning her daughter Sheila’s 60th birthday
party in June 2020 when the phone rang.
She had been imagining family members traveling from Washington, DC, to
celebrate at the beach with crab legs and potato salad, when she picked
up to hear Maria Shepperd, her granddaughter and Sheila’s daughter,
sobbing.
Maria was alone, performing chest compressions on her mother after she
had fainted and stopped breathing. The 13-year-old had called 911 —
like tens of millions of people do each year when they need help —
then called Billie from another phone as she spoke to the dispatcher.
Billie heard Maria give 911 her correct address.
“She said it so clearly and often, 414 Oglethorpe Northeast,”
Billie recalled.
But medics were instead dispatched to 414 Oglethorpe Northwest, nearly
a mile and a half away, dispatch audio reviewed by CNN shows. The
mix-up would cost critical minutes as Maria fought to save her
mother’s life.
It was another misstep by DC 911 that placed the city’s dispatch
system — still troubled by staffing shortages, hiring difficulties
and botched dispatches — under further scrutiny, watchdogs and
advocates say. But the issues in the nation’s capital reflect a
broader crisis unfolding at call centers across the US that 911
professionals and experts is fueled by burnout, outdated technology and
chronic underfunding.
These circumstances have fostered environments nationwide where errors
are able to slip through after Americans dial the three-digit number
they’re increasingly dependent on.
Audio from Maria’s 911 call, obtained by CNN, shows she gave the
correct address three times. But Sheila Shepperd had to wait for more
than 20 minutes before first responders finally arrived.
When they took over compressions from her daughter, it was too late.
Sheila died that day.
DC’s Office of Unified Communications (OUC), which handles the
capital’s 911 system, declined to comment specifically on the
Shepperds’ case. Director Heather McGaffin said the OUC is
“committed to integrating best practices” to provide “equitable
access” to 911, in an emailed statement.
It’s impossible to know if a quicker response would’ve saved
Sheila’s life, but the mistake five years ago illustrates what’s at
stake when something goes catastrophically wrong at any of America’s
centers.
Hundreds of millions of 911 calls pour into the country’s roughly
6,000 dispatch centers each year. Without national mandates for an
industry straining under that reliance, the speed, efficiency and care
that calls are handled with vary from each city and county.
Billie says she’s still waiting for an apology — and a 911 system
she can rely on.
‘The forgotten stepchild of public safety’
For over 55 years, 911 has been the first call Americans make in a
crisis and dispatchers have been the first link in the chain of
emergency response.
When Maria Shepperd called, the dispatcher coached her through
administering chest compressions on her mother.
“1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4.” She counted with the dispatcher through
sobs as she pressed into her mother’s chest for more than 13 minutes.
The dispatcher reassured Maria that she was doing a good job.
Dispatchers and call takers must assess an emergency, coordinate a
response and relay exact details to first responders — all while
keeping the caller calm, and sometimes, alive.
“Without (dispatchers), it’s a mess,” said Adam Wasserman,
assistant director for emergency communications in Washington state.
“They’re taking all this information over the phone to build a
picture that they then turn around and hand to the field first
responder to prepare them the best to go into the scene,” he said.
But unlike the firefighters, police and paramedics they work with, 911
dispatchers are as public safety professionals or first responders by
the federal government. Nationally, they go without mandates for
training requirements, staffing and technology, leaving it up to the
individual cities and counties to set the standards.
Since other branches of public safety like police and fire are more
visible to the public, they also tend to receive more local funding,
National Emergency Number Association CEO Brian Fontes said, dubbing
911 “the forgotten stepchild of public safety.”
In the absence of federal mandates and cheap equipment, the technology
dispatchers rely on varies wildly depending on where they work.
Some centers have Next Generation 911, the latest technology that can
pinpoint a caller’s exact location, receive live video, and two-way
text. But those capabilities are limited to centers that can afford
them, typically in bigger, resourced metro areas, like Seattle.
In some rural areas, experts said, operators still flip through paper
maps and take notes by hand, relying on distressed callers to describe
cross-streets and landmarks.
A 2018 report to Congress it would cost nearly $13 billion to modernize
all US dispatch with the high-tech NG911 system. Fontes said that’s
about $15.3 billion today.
DC dispatch is transitioning to NG911, using much of its capabilities.
In 2020, it had to rely on Maria, who was just 13, to accurately relay
her address to the dispatcher. A more advanced system might’ve
alerted dispatchers that the address manually entered appeared far from
where it geolocated Maria’s call.
“Children are taught to call 911, and everybody just assumes it’s
working at the best available capabilities,” Fontes said. “Well,
unfortunately, technology has advanced far more than the technology
inside the call centers have.”
Experts say limited tech can create dangerous circumstances.
In Lemhi County, Idaho, for example, if the sole dispatch center goes
down, 911 calls go unanswered. The roughly 8,000 residents in this
rural area, known for poor cell coverage, are forced to dial a 10-digit
backup number, which further delays response times.
The county — and many like it across the country — doesn’t yet
have the NG911 capability to reroute callers to nearby dispatch
centers, but Idaho is now set to spend millions in grants to modernize
systems statewide, said Eric Newman, Idaho’s 911 program manager.
As some regions look to competitive grants for upgrades, 911 centers
rely mainly on local budgets as they battle chronic underfunding and
fight over resources with better-known services like police and fire.
Obstacles in hiring, training dispatchers
This patchwork funding for centers breeds an overworked and
underprepared workforce.
In a of nearly 1,400 911 professionals, the National Emergency Number
Association and Carbyne found that staffing issues are the biggest
challenge for dispatch centers, including burnout, struggles to hire
and retain staff and high reports of new hires flunking out of
training.
“It’s critical that we do everything we can to make these jobs
desirable to get the best talent out there,” Wasserman said.
“You’re not just answering phones, you’re saving lives on a daily
basis.”
DC’s Office of Unified Communications has faced significant staffing
shortages for years. It more than 33% of all shifts in May at its
centers didn’t meet staffing targets. In June, it was nearly 22%.
The scramble to fill seats, some advocates say, is so urgent that
dispatchers are rushed through training, raising concerns about the
quality of subsequent emergency response.
Dave Statter, a former reporter who closely tracks DC’s 911 system,
believes the agency “ran people through quickly with shorter
training, and the full training wasn’t up to par.”
He tracks instances where responders were sent to the wrong quadrant of
the city, as happened in the Shepperds’ case, and other missteps.
Statter believes the OUC has made at least dozens of address-related
mistakes just this year, one as recently as August 2.
OUC’s training is accredited by the Association for Public Safety
Communications Officials and is followed by quality assurance, a senior
OUC official said.
Though the biggest obstacles to quality 911 training in any case are
the cost and time commitment, said Ty Wooten, the director of
government affairs for the International Academies of Emergency
Dispatch, which sets global standards for dispatch training and
protocols.
Wooten said training in the industry is varied. For the more than
100,000 dispatchers in the US, some of them receive classroom training
lasting weeks. Others are thrown into the job like he was.
“That first night, my training was, ‘There’s the phone, there’s
the radio. Don’t mess it up,’” Wooten said.
His first call as a 911 dispatcher in Indiana, he said, was “very
traumatic.”
When he picked up, the woman on the other end told him her husband had
just shot himself on their couch in front of her and their
seven-year-old child.
“I just froze. I had no idea what to do,” Wooten said.
He put the call in the back of his mind, he said, with a “brick
wall” around it so he wouldn’t have to think about it. Taking so
many calls, Wooten said, is taxing and makes it hard for dispatchers to
process the traumatic situations they encounter.
He said he struggled with his mental health while working as a
dispatcher for about six years.
Mental health resources for dispatchers, he said, are imperative to
combat burnout and minimize staffing shortages as Americans continue to
rely on 911 for emergency — and nonemergent — issues.
Overwhelming under-resourced systems
For a system originally built for rotary phones and landlines, some
call volumes are stretching an already strained system.
DC regularly ranks as one of the busiest cities for 911 in the US,
behind New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles, handling more than 1.6
million calls in fiscal year 2024, according to the OUC.
But only around 75% of those calls were prompting a campaign to
encourage residents to use the 311 number for police non-emergencies to
free up resources.
More than half of NENA survey respondents also said that between 50%
and 80% of their calls are non-emergencies.
“In today’s world, 911 is the number to call if you hear something,
say something. It is the number that is dialed when there are fires,
floods, school shootings, emergencies in the community or in a
region,” Fontes said.
Many of the country’s biggest cities and counties utilize 311 to
appropriately allocate resources, but most of those non-emergency calls
still funnel through 911, overwhelming under-resourced systems with
pressure they weren’t built to handle.
Because when the infrastructure can’t keep up, some experts say, the
consequences can be perilous.
Eighty-eight percent of NENA respondents reported some type of
equipment outage in the past year. That includes instances where tech
that dispatchers rely on to answer calls, locate people and coordinate
with ambulances or fire trucks simply went dark, leaving them
scrambling to respond to emergencies.
In Los Angeles County, a system crash during New Year’s Eve left the
nation’s largest sheriff’s department on radio and manual dispatch
for weeks.
Last summer, a computer outage in DC coincided with the cardiac arrest
and death of an infant, as reported by .
The OUC declined to comment on the incident.
Like Sheila Shepperd’s case, there’s no evidence the outcome for
the infant would have changed had the system been working. And now,
some centers work to get ahead of tragedies.
‘This is a greater problem’
Many agencies know their systems are faulty. But for most, years of
underfunding and patchwork upgrades mean the system still fails
residents when they need help most.
Without national mandates or sustained funding, meaningful upgrades are
slow to materialize. Some regions and companies are trying fixes of
their own.
911 calls in Collier County, Florida, now go through one of the
emergency centers in the country as the area wraps up a nearly
decade-long transition to the NG911 system.
The county has joined with Charleston, South Carolina, more than 600
miles away, as backup centers for each other during outages – which
can occur during disasters, like hurricanes – so devastated areas can
still rely on 911.
As some centers are adopting platforms that allow callers to send
dispatchers live video and be instantly geolocated, access to those
features remains deeply uneven.
Other centers are piloting artificial intelligence tools to assist call
takers in real time, flagging errors before they’re dispatched,
spotting trends and aiding communication with distressed callers.
Still, these reforms remain piecemeal and are isolated to places with
political will and financial resources. Advocates warn the gap between
high-performing and struggling dispatch centers will widen without a
national standard.
For Billie Shepperd, the system’s failures aren’t merely
statistics, and the reforms can’t heal a lifelong wound.
She misses her daughter and mourns the experiences she had hoped to
share with her.
Billie said she now prays she doesn’t need to call 911 for herself.
“I don’t have too many expectations that way from Washington, and,
from what I read, across the country,” she said. “This is a greater
problem.”
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