With 911 dispatch center delayed, St. Louis faces slow response times

0:00This is St. Louis on the Air from St. Louis Public Radio. I'm Elaine Cha. A centralized 911 center in the city of St. Louis that was planned to open this year will not. Today the city's Department of Public Safety informed St. Louis on the air that the timeline has changed. The 911 center is now on track to open next year in the fall of 2027. The center is just one part of the larger struggle of this region to improve its fragmented 911 systems. The delay also comes at a time when residents in public officials and cities across the country are facing similar challenges. This summer multiple reports showed for the first time the big picture of the problems facing this system. It's not just the number of 911 calls made but where they came from, how long it took for police to respond and how many people were left with no response at all.

1:06These reports have provided the clearest picture yet of a problem afflicting St. Louis City and other cities in the US. Now this problem isn't new. Between 2017 and 2019 about 1.3 million 911 calls were made to the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department. The details of those calls tell us a great deal about the real life needs of St. Louis residents when they dial 911. And joining me now to talk about what those numbers show, I'm joined by Jalan Yang, who is Senior Director of Storytelling and Communications at Fort Worthy Ferguson and Author of its Transforming 911 report. Jiao, welcome to St. Louis on the air. Thanks for having me. So let's talk about this data. It is historical and you looked at a couple of years. What were those years again and why did you evaluate those years just before the pandemic?

2:06Our data comes from over 1.3 million 911 calls made to St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department between January 1, 2017 and December 31, 2019. And part of the reason why we felt like it was important to share that is because there is an overlap and similarity in terms of the timeframe between that and the last analysis that we released in 2023. And that was from data between 2015 and 2020 of an analysis of over 1.7 million 911 calls made to St. Louis County Police Department. And when you think about data, it's very important. You might not be able to compare apples to apples, but at least apples to oranges just to understand what's happening in the region. Now the previous study of St. Louis County's 911 system, what did you find there? We found that the vast majority of 911 calls are not for major crimes. Actually the calls for 911 really showed us that residents are mostly calling 80% of their calls for non-major crimes.

3:11And the reason why we say crimes is because according to the FBI categories, that's kind of what we use to categorize the 911 calls. But really, residents are calling for service and medical reasons in the county. St. Louis City categorizes the calls a little bit differently, but what we found is that the vast majority of calls are for service and miscellaneous policing. And what that means is that most of the times residents want some backup when they want to check out a disturbance, maybe someone is missing. Or when it comes to miscellaneous policing, that really has to do with the police function. And so it's administrative things, documenting, transporting people. And so really we need to think about when residents are calling 911, are they getting the support that they need? And what did you find about how long it took for folks who are calling to get some kind of response? What was interesting to me is that there is inequities in the call response times. So depending on what neighborhood that you're in, it might change.

4:14So officers responded slowest to 911 calls in riverview, skinkered to Boliver and vannevenner at 17.5 to 22 minutes. And fastest to 911 calls in botanical gardens, North Hampton and Southwest garden, 12 to 13 minutes. 17 to 25 minutes. 22, 22. That is a long time, but there to be any kind of response. Was that any surprise to you or the colleagues you worked with on that first report? I think it was more surprising that there were differences in neighborhoods. And it's not necessarily surprising when you think about St. Louis region as a whole. As you mentioned, the St. Louis region is incredibly fragmented. And that shows up in the 911 response. But to have specific names of neighborhoods that have those differences, that was interesting to us. And then also thinking about the average response time to the 911 calls in the city was 15 minutes. And so you look at the highest priority calls being 5 minutes, but the lowest priority calls being 23 minutes.

5:19And so on the one hand, it does make sense that when it's lower priority, a slower response time might be okay. But something that we're reminded over and over again, both by residents, and also Dr. LJ Punch, founder of 314 Oasis, is that time is life. So when you're in an emergency situation, you don't necessarily want the response to be slow. And that really breaks down the trust that people have in the only 24-7 fully funded system for emergency response. We'd like to invite you to this conversation. What has your experience with 911 response been in the St. Louis area? Give us a call at 314-382-8255. That's 314-382-TALK. We'll also take your emails at talk at stlpr.org. So a major part of this report, Jot, uses data to describe what people are actually calling 9114 and where those calls originated.

6:21And you describe some of the reasons people were calling. Some of the data also was qualitative. What were some of the stories that you were able to collect from people who had called 911 and then, you know, just sort of left with whatever came thereafter? Over the last couple of years, we've really made an effort to ask residents what their experiences with 911 are. Most of us don't think about 911 on a regular basis, but they were able to jog their memory and realize that it's kind of a story that many residents in St. Louis can relate to. They call 911 and they're put on hold or the response time is long. And also, if they actually get a response, it's not always what they want or need. And so in St. Louis, as in many other cities, 100% of the time, when someone is being sent out to respond to a 911 call, it's an armed police officer. It's someone with a gun and a badge and they're really equipped and trained to arrest people and incarcerate them, send them into a system that involves courts and policing.

7:28And what's difficult is that when you look at the data, like I mentioned, most of the time when residents are calling, only 3% are for major crimes in St. Louis City. And so that other 97% is really, they want support, they want connection to services, they want someone to help with deescalating a situation. Sometimes they need material help. And those are things that are social issues that police officers are not trained or equipped to respond to. The report highlights that police spent 21% of their time responding to calls in just 5 neighborhoods. Those are Dutch town, downtown, central West End, Caron Delet, and downtown West. What did that tell you? It really told us that there is probably more research that needs to be done about what these residents are facing. And I think it's really important to know that there is kind of a concentrated amount of time that police officers are spending in these areas.

8:32Now we don't really have good data about why. Maybe people in those areas have more wants and needs that require them to call 911. Or maybe police officers are patrolling those areas more often. We don't really know. And so one of the things that we have as far as transforming 911 recommendations is to have better data. We need better transparency and access to why residents are calling 911 and how we can meet those needs. Rather than just accepting that the system is the way that it is and that fragmented, inefficient, and outdated 911 system is what we have. I think we deserve better than that. St. Louis on the air producer Danny Listenthowski, he reached out to the mayor of St. Louis. And in response to questions our team sent out, mayor Cara Spencer sent back a statement this morning. Her response said in part that St. Louis is, quote, committed to partnering in building a transparent, equitable, and modern emergency response system

9:39that ensures every resident receives the right response at the right time. Now the statement added that the city has, quote, already been actively addressing these structural challenges to transforming emergency operations across all St. Louis neighborhoods. So, Judd, I mean to what extent have you seen this, you know, is the city actively addressing the challenges that were just laid out? I wish I could give you a better answer, but we did reach out to the city when we were producing this transforming 911 part two report focus on the city. And we weren't able to get an answer unfortunately. So when you look at the recommendation section at the end of the report, it does show updates. And so what we tried to do with scour news and other sources to find out what the city was doing since we released our first transforming 911 report in 2023. And when we look at the data around why residents are calling 911 and police are spending their time, we can kind of make some assumptions, not perfect assumptions that not much has changed.

10:47And so even though the mayor's statement has some really good words about what the city is trying to do, I want to see structural and social changes to that. So for example, there is a 911 emergency call center that would potentially house the climate emergency management system and also police, fire and emes and medical all under one roof. That would be great, but that facility, which is located on Jefferson Avenue, is not yet completed. And so I think that's kind of indicative and kind of metaphor for some of the changes that have yet to happen. When we think about streamlining the 911 system, it also requires getting police fire and emes at the table to understand what it will take to cross train them to have similar training protocols and codes. How they can streamline their processes to work better together and also modernizing the system to use next generation 911, which exists in the county and St. Charles to allow residents to text when they're in an emergency and also to take advantage of geolocation data that's available with our cell phones.

12:02This morning, we also heard from St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, mentioned the police as one of the parties here. And public information officer Evita Caldwell also argued that the department's 911 system is improving. She pointed to a program that was started in 2021 that deploys behavioral health responders along with officers. So a program like that, you does that make a difference. It does make a certain amount of difference because anytime you have social workers or counselors or people who are equipped better trained in behavioral health and mental health response, that will improve outcomes. However, that is a co-responder model where a police officer is still there. What we've actually found is that first responder alternative programs that exist in cities across the country can relieve even more of the burden on the 911 system and also close to 100% of the time they don't need back up from an armed police officer.

13:08So when we think about the slow response times, that can be really resolved by a first responder alternative such as cahoots or Denver star that we see in cities across the country that have used that and also saved money in the process. The St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department also mentioned another improvement. The 911 system includes a prompt that allows people to choose the type of emergency. So the appropriate unit could respond. So is that, you know, is that a step forward or are people actually finding that it is helpful? I don't think we have enough data to understand whether people are finding that helpful. When we talked to the county, for example, they had a survey system where residents were able to rate or share how the 911 calls went. We don't have a program like that in the city. If we had something like that, we could better understand how residents are dealing with programs like this and interventions, whether they're effective or not.

14:16So we do find that triaging and better information to triage calls is helpful. However, that doesn't solve the problem of understaffing around dispatch dispatchers call takers. We need more call takers and they need to be better trained and they need better pay and upward mobility in St. Louis city. So you might only have two call takers at a time and that really causes problems. And the problems that are related to response time and I want to return to something that you had mentioned earlier about 15 to 22 minutes being sort of the average response time. What does that term refer to specifically? Like, is it how long they're waiting on the phone for somebody to pick up on the other side? Is it for someone to actually show up in order to provide some assistance? So call response time for the transforming 911 project really refers to when the call is answered and when someone arrives on the scene to support or answer. And that's usually an armed police officer.

15:23When you're talking about the call arriving and when it's picked up and answered, that's a call arrival time and answering time. So those are two different kind of metrics that we're talking about. We do know that there was an analysis by mother Jones recently about the call arrival time. And the standard is for I think 90% of those calls to be answered within 15 seconds and then more than that, maybe 95% of those calls within 20 seconds. And so that's not what we were looking at. We were actually more interested in why residents are calling 911 and whether or not that matches up with the support that they're getting when an armed police officer showing up. Are they able to resolve resolve the situation that the resident is calling for? We need to take a very quick break here, but we'll be back shortly to pick up this conversation about the state of 911 response in St. Louis and to introduce another voice with perspective about the way St. Louis compares to other cities in the US.

16:27In the meantime, we'd like to hear from you. What has your experience with 911 response in the St. Louis area being? And if you've lived elsewhere, what was different about 911 response there? Give us a call at 314-382-8255. That's 314-382-TALK. We'll be right back. This is St. Louis on the Air on St. Louis Public Radio. Welcome back. Let's be turned to our conversation about the state of 911 response in St. Louis. We've been speaking with Jolly on Yang, communications and storytelling director at Forward to Ferguson, which is recently published the St. Louis City edition of its Transforming 911 series. It put out its report focused on data and stories from St. Louis County in 2023. For insight from a national perspective, we have another voice to add.

17:36Byrd Duncan is a journalist, an author of an article in Mother Jones titled Across the Country, Collars and Deadly Situations, a routinely left-on-hold that peace includes St. Louis. Byrd, welcome to the program. Hi, thanks for having me. So, Byrd, you focused on the time that it takes for a 911 call to be picked up, you know, the actual phone call. Why did you decide to focus your attention there? Yeah, so I was looking for a way to understand exactly how effective 911 response is across the country and to put it in as simple terms as I possibly could. You know, we heard already quite a bit about response times, which are very important metric when it comes to measuring the efficacy of both 911 and police departments themselves. But I was hoping to understand the exact relationship between dispatch centers and some of the staffing issues that they've had historically, especially since the pandemic, and how that sort of trickles down to the public and whether or not there's a degree of harm associated with it.

18:47So, I decided to look at what we gestured at earlier, which are call answer times and the national standard for picking up 911 calls. How long it takes to reach an operator, which is 90% of calls usually need to be answered in 15 seconds or less. Wow, 15 seconds is that's much shorter than what we were talking about earlier. And I do understand that Byrd, for you, your exploration of this issue, it began with a personal experience of 911 in Oakland. Tell us about that. That's right. Yeah, so I live in Oakland, California and a few years ago back in 2022, I was out for a run near my house. And I saw this giant plume of smoke and I rounded a corner and saw an enormous fire by the freeway. I think it was an encampment that had caught fire and there was like a lot of dry brush on the side of the freeway.

19:48So I called 911 as I stood there on the overpass looking at this fire and was essentially put on hold. It was essentially told. There's no operators available. Please, please wait. And I just thought that was astonishing. I wasn't aware that it was possible to be put on hold for 911. So that was sort of the seed of the story that got me curious about the issue. And after a while putting some other projects down, I was able to really focus on this and what I did was submit public records requests to the 100 largest cities across the country, which includes Oakland, to understand what percentage of their calls were being picked up fast enough, which is to say within this 15 second benchmark. Why did you go with that number 100? I mean, that is a lot of a lot of work and a lot of data. Well, it's a small fraction of the number of dispatch centers across the country. There are around 6000 dispatch centers 911 dispatch centers all across the United States.

20:53There's not one federal agency overseeing them. And so, you know, you can't just send a request to one large government agency and get all the data you want back. And the data I got back when I did get it, I only heard back from about 68 or 69 cities of the 100. It looked different in different places. But for the most part, they're all striving toward this 15 second standard. Some are doing well, including some some large cities and some many, unfortunately, about half are falling short of that standard. And St. Louis is one of those that fall short, right? St. Louis is one of those that fall short and has fallen short for several years in a row. In 2022, St. Louis St. Louis's dispatch center was only able to answer about 59% of 911 calls in 15 seconds or less. Again, the standard is is 90% in 2023.

21:53It moved up to about 63%. And in 2025, the last year for which there's full data, it hit 78%, which is, you know, a pretty dramatic improvement from 2022, but still well short of the standard. And I think one thing that's important to remember, you know, if you're thinking, oh, 78%, that's pretty close to 90%. These are emergency calls for the most part. So, you know, the 90% standard exists for a reason. And furthermore, even if you're picking up 78% of 911 calls within 15 seconds in 2025, city data shows that there were around 23,000 callers that waited longer than 60 seconds in St. Louis. So that's about 63 calls per day that that were ringing or getting an automated message for at least a minute. We have Elizabeth who is calling from St. Louis with something to share. Elizabeth, welcome to the show. Hello. Hello. Yes, please go ahead.

22:54Well, I have experienced a hit and run and I called 911 and they were fast to pick up. I took them back half an hour, 45 minutes to get there. And I was worried because I didn't know if the person would come back or not. But he showed up really nice, but he said I was like number eight or nine on the list. So I mean, there's a lot of calls for one police officer. And I had the picture of the license plate and everything, but they said they don't, you know, they don't look them up. If they're in the city and they get a license plate reader, they'll pull them over. Even though he could tell me where they, you know, what area they actually lived in, which was North, Florescent. Elizabeth, thank you for calling. Joll, Leon is still with us from Forty Ferguson. What is your reaction to hearing what Elizabeth shared? Immediately, I flipped to the part of our report that talks about the different categories of calls and what the response time is.

23:55And on average, incidents that around attacks on a person were the fastest at about 12.2 minutes. But the slowest response time was for traffic incidents, 17.3 minutes. And so what this caller is talking about is a traffic incident, something related to a car accident or something happening in traffic. And I think that's really unfortunate because when you are in the street, maybe your car is in a place where it doesn't need to be or you're experiencing a medical emergency related to that, you want that response time to be pretty quick. And so I feel that it's really unfortunate that she experienced that. But again, if we were able to better streamline our 911 system, make it more modern, and also implement a first responder alternative program that takes into account things like traffic, then perhaps callers like Elizabeth would get the support that they needed.

24:55By do you have any quick thoughts on what our caller Elizabeth shared? I will say I'm pleased to hear that the call was answered quickly. You know, these are sort of distinct issues, right? Like you can have a dispatch center that is well staffed enough or the call volume is low enough relative to the staffing they have on hand at the time so that your call is picked up quickly. But it's a dynamic relationship with the police department as well. If your police department itself, your patrol personnel are understaffed, it actually doesn't matter how quickly dispatch can pick up because they're going to have to dispatch to a very busy force of folks who are out there doing other things. So, you know, it's definitely a dynamic relationship. Byrd, you found that cities are doing this better, you know, responding to 911 calls, and some of those places are Lexington, Kentucky, and Cincinnati, Ohio.

25:56What are they doing to do better to get it right? In general, it comes down to staffing. You know, as we heard a bit before, this is a tremendously difficult job. And in many cases, the people who do this job, the 911 telecommunicators are underappreciated. They are underpaid. They're forced to work long hours, sometimes with very little notice if somebody calls in. There's just a tremendous amount of scholarship around, you know, how PTSD and thoughts of suicide and all sorts of different mental health afflictions are occurring in a higher frequency among 911 telecommunicators than even police or firefighters. And so, I think, you know, we have a nationwide issue with under staffing among 911 centers. And I think that although it isn't a multifaceted question, and there's issues of technological upgrades and the use of AI, which can be productive to sort of screen calls initially and instantaneously, what it has come down to and what it continues to come down to is under staffing.

27:09Joe, what do you see being the best way that agencies here in the St. Louis region can make improvements? I mean, the report has many, many recommendations. What stands out at the top? Is it staffing? I think staffing is definitely an important piece of the pie, but I think less about the specific recommendations, even though we have them and they're all in the report. So, when you think about what needs to transform in about the 911 system, you have to start with deep listening. You have to start with listening to the stories behind why people are calling 911. And what that means about how police officers are spending their time and what that could mean also about compassionate, highly trained civilians in a first responder program responding to those things. So, as an example, I'm thinking about the community first responder network that's launching this month by 304 Oasis and also other people who are involved with tornado recovery efforts.

28:12They are trying to train people to respond to medical emergencies, overdoses, and also need for a connection to social services. Those are all things that residents can more quickly respond to within their own neighborhoods to alleviate the burden on the 911 system. And by in the last 30 seconds, what has the response being to your mother Jones piece and what does it indicate about where to go next? I would say the most pronounced response has come from the workforce itself. I think as we heard before, a lot of people don't think about 911 very often until the moment they need it and then they either have a positive experience or as positive as it can be, or a very negative one, where they're placed on hold or they're placed on hold. They're waiting a long time for first responders to arrive. The thing I heard again and again from this workforce was that they need better pay, more recognition, and to be recognized as first responders. Buyer Duncan is a journalist and author of the mother Jones piece across the country, colors and deadly situations are routine left on hold.

29:19And Jalian Yang is senior director of storytelling and communications at Forward Through Ferguson. Thank you both for joining us today. Thanks for having us. Thank you. This episode was produced by Danny Wysentowski, audio engineering and podcast designed by Aaron Doerr. Our executive producer is Alex Hoyer. St. Louis on the air is a production of St. Louis Public Radio. Understanding starts here. Do you find yourself regularly listening to episodes of St. Louis on the air? Suggest us to a friend you think might enjoy our conversations and leave us a review and rating on Apple Podcasts on the App Store. It's the simplest way to help people discover our show. Thank you. St. Louis Public Radio is a member supported service of the University of Missouri, St. Louis.

30:22You