After Mayor Bill de Blasio said the city’s current 911 system was both over budget and years behind where his predecessor, former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, wanted it to be, the city is putting the 91 call system overhaul on pause. File photo
The city is putting its 911 call system overhaul on pause.
Mayor Bill de Blasio said the city’s current system was both over budget and years behind where his predecessor had wanted it to be, which prompted Deputy Mayor Anthony Shorris to call for a 60-day suspension on all work and spending on the 911 Emergency Communications Transformation Program overhaul.
Published reports showed Shorris to have penned a letter to city commissioners calling on the Department of Investigation to review the system’s recent years under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Moving forward, de Blasio acknowledged the city was throwing taxpayer dollars into a program that was not producing results and would put it on hold to make way for a more appropriate plan.
Bloomberg first introduced the overhaul in 2005, budgeted at $1.3 million to streamline the city’s emergency response preparedness, but those efforts were proven ineffective after new reports clocked emergency response times for FDNY ambulances at almost 10 minutes. Shorris has since said the project already surpassed $2 billion and would need at least another $100 million to be finished by 2018 at the earliest.
A report released in late March, which was the result of a new data-collecting method that oversaw how long it took for callers to reach fire department dispatchers, concluded city ambulance response times were on average 9 minutes and 42 seconds in early 2014. Elected officials throughout the city saw it as prime evidence to suggest the 911 call system was still in need of a fresh start.
City Councilwoman Elizabeth Crowley (D-Middle Village), who also chairs the Committee on Fire and Criminal Justice Services, has been a consistent critic of the entire system over recent years and applauded the decision to admit mistakes and move forward.
“Today marks a significant step in fixing our City’s flawed 911 call taking system,” she said the day Shorris called for the halt. “In an attempt by the Bloomberg administration to oversimplify a complicated multi-departmental service, the system became too heavily centralized within the NYPD and created more problems than it solved. A nearly nine and a half minute average emergency medical response time is unacceptable and irresponsible.”
The overhaul saw plenty of hiccups along the way, all of which contributed to the poor response times. Former Police Commissioner Ray Kelly admitted last summer that more dispatchers were needed in the city’s call centers to help address some of those problems, but response times continued to go up.
Frank Kotnik of the 104th Precinct Civilian Observation Patrol said the system was certain to have its glitches over time, but he still had faith in the city’s ability to respond to emergencies with efficiency.
“We have over 8 million people in this city. There are thousands of phone calls to 911 every single day,” he said. “This is something that will be worked out in the future. At our level, we don’t see a critical problem.”
Groups like the 104th COP have utilized volunteers throughout the Glendale, Maspeth, Middle Village and Ridgewood communities to supplement emergency response times alongside nearby police precincts, Kotnik said. He also went on to say that concerned residents in central Queens were urged to contact or join the civilian patrol at (718) 497-1500.
By Phil Corso
