New automated system could change wait time for emergency calls

Portland’s 911 operators have been falling behind. Standards for taking emergency calls are set at 90% answered within 15 seconds. Portland’s rate stands at 43%. This is partly due to staffing and the rise of crime and the number of calls the agency has been receiving, but the bureau is focused on reducing the workload for 911 operators. Currently, they handle both emergency and non-emergency calls, leading to longer wait times. The city plans on implementing an automated system for non-emergency calls so operators can focus on more pressing emergencies in the city. Some police officers have brought up concerns about an automated system taking jobs away from Portlanders and mental health professionals say machines can’t pick up the nuances of speech or answer questions from callers. Beyond how this system will work for users, the software behind one of the programs the city wants to implement is contracted by Versaterm, the company responsible for the Portland Police Department record management system that is riddled with bugs and glitches. Director of the Bureau of Emergency Communication for Portland Bob Cozzie joins us for details on how this new system of automatic responses will work.

The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Portland officials say that emergency response has itself become a kind of emergency. The city has seen a 28% increase in 911 calls in the last year. And the people who make those calls are waiting longer and longer before they’re getting an answer. The average wait time has doubled. Bob Cozzie is the director of Portland’s Bureau of Emergency Communications. He joins us now to talk about plans to address this. Bob Cozzie, welcome to Think Out Loud.

Bob Cozzie: Thank you, Dave. It’s a pleasure to be here today.

Miller: Why have calls increased so much over the last year?

Cozzie: There’s a variety of reasons. There is definitely an uptick in crime that’s occurring in the city and in the county as a whole. There’s also the reality of cell phone usage. Everyone has a phone these days and for something as simple as a traffic accident on the freeway that can result in dozens and dozens of 911 calls into our system.

Miller: Is there a way to quickly handle the kind of redundant? I mean, I guess you only really need one call for any one incident as long as it’s handled correctly. Right? Is there a way, if you get 10 calls for one crash, is there a quick way to handle that?

Cozzie: Our call takers are trained to treat each call as if it’s a new emergency, but there are ways that they can determine a little more quickly whether or not calls are related. An example of that would be, if we get a traffic accident that’s resulting in numerous calls into our center and all the calls are coming in roughly at the same time when we’re able to determine what the emergency is by asking, “What’s the location of the emergency?” That’s one of the first things that we ask Hearing the location can really clue in the call taker on what the emergency might be. So then they can confirm very quickly at that point, “Are you reporting the traffic accident on I-205″ for example, near whatever exit. So they do receive training in doing that. That doesn’t really stop the calls from coming into our center though.

Miller: And you still have to go through some of those questions to get that information.

Cozzie: Exactly.

Miller: Is there any reason to believe that call volume is going to decrease significantly any time soon?

Cozzie: We always see an increase over the summer and then as fall and winter draw near the calls do tend to decrease. What’s problematic and what I’m seeing in our trends is that, while calls are beginning to decrease as we are heading out of summer, they’re not decreasing as much as I would like to see for us to maintain a sustainable operation.

Miller: Call volume is sort of half of the equation, the work coming in. The other is how much work you can actually do, which is really a question of staffing. What does staffing look like?

Cozzie: Right now we have funding for 131 employees, dispatch employees. We have 114 positions filled right now and we’re actively, constantly recruiting actually. We have an academy in progress right now with nine trainees and we also have four more scheduled through the end of 2022.

Miller: So what is life like for the people who are answering calls right now?

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Cozzie: They are very busy and have very little time in between calls to really think about what they just experienced, to be able to debrief in some cases. Our call takers are having to go back to back to back from call to call. Unlike other first responders, typically we’ll dispatch police or fire on a call, they’ll respond, they’ll write a report, they’ll complete that call. But they have a little bit of downtime in between calls. For a 911 call taker, they really get no downtime unless they’re on a lunch break.

Miller: So it sounds like you’re gonna be trying to bring more people into the fold in the coming weeks and months. What is training like?

Cozzie: Training is a very long process. When we go through the recruitment process to begin with, we really want to make sure we’re hiring the right people. We look at a number of factors, try to bring in employees who are resilient, that’re able to handle the stress and pressures that this job really requires. But we also look at people who are able to get along well with others. Because these are folks that are in the heat of battle all day during their shift and it’s really easy to become combative in those cases with people around you when you’re under a lot of stress. So we bring in people with the right frame of mind, if you will, so that they are able to tolerate the stressful environment that they’re going through. But once we get them on board, they go through a training academy that’s a couple months long and then they have really a year and a half to two years of on the job training until they’re fully certified.

Miller: Okay, so it’s not like you can quickly bring people up to speed. This takes basically two years before they’re fully members of the team. So let’s turn to some of the fixes that are in the works besides bringing more people on. Some are technological, like an automated call back feature. What’s the idea behind this?

Cozzie: That’s a feature that’s already available to us within our call answering phone system. We are moving forward with that project. About 20% of our 911 calls end up becoming hang ups for a variety of reasons: Sometimes they’re pocket dials, accidental dials. Sometimes people call 911 and they might be on hold for a while, because we’re so busy, and they hang up thinking that maybe they didn’t get through, so then that creates another call. The 911 hang up calls that we receive require a callback from one of our call takers. And that process in and of itself takes a lot of work because, not only is the original call coming in, now we’re having to take a call taker off of call answering duty to make calls back to people who have hung up to 911. And that process can take a matter of minutes rather than seconds in terms of being answered and getting the help that they need.

Miller: So the idea is to automate that to make that go faster.

Cozzie: Yeah. And it’s really an artificial intelligence that calls the caller back, asks them to press a button if they have an emergency, they press a different button if they don’t have an emergency. And that counts as the call back. If they do have an emergency, it places them right back in the 911 queue so that we can answer their phone.

Miller: If I’m not mistaken, the company that has this software is the same one that you use for other things right now and the same one that the Police Bureau uses to file reports. The Oregonian had an article a couple years ago about this software with officers complaining that the system was too cumbersome and complicated to use, that it took twice as long to complete electronic police reports because entering the information in the fields was not intuitive. Has this company gotten any better?

Cozzie: Yeah, it’s actually two different technologies. The automated abandoned callback is a feature through our telephone provider. But what I think you’re referring to is..

Miller: It’s a company called Versaterm.

Cozzie: Yeah, Versaterm is our computer aided dispatch vendor and they’re also the city of Portland PPB’s records management vendor. So Versaterm has this technology called Case Service. And Case Service is a Web-based platform that allows someone who is reporting a non-emergency to access the system through their computer or through their phone. And it uses an artificial intelligence to sort of triage their call; this is recognizing that it’s a non-emergency because we want people to call 911 for an emergency. But the Web-based platform allows them to enter their information from their computer or their phone that can go directly to Portland Police Bureau or Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office or Gresham Police for that matter because we dispatch for all three of those agencies. And it can go directly to their records management system for their triage within their structures.

Miller: So just briefly though, do you have faith in this software? This report from a couple years ago made it seem like it’s cumbersome and wasn’t great.

Cozzie: Yeah, the report is referring to the records management system. This is, like I said, a web portal that really interfaces with the community member who’s trying to make a non-emergency report. I’ve seen the demo of it and it looks very straightforward. It looks very easy to use and very intuitive.

Miller: Another bigger systemic change would be to make it so all non-emergency calls are handled by a different system, by the 311 system which the city runs right now, a different bureau. And it’s more limited in terms of staffing and hours, eight AM to five PM just on weekdays. What would it take to actually expand that to all the time, to take non-emergency calls off of your plate?

Cozzie: Yeah, they are actually seeking to expand their operation more on a fast track. And I really appreciate the fact that the 311 program is stepping to the plate in this way. But what they’re planning on doing is adding additional staffing so they can accommodate a number of the calls that we currently take on our non-emergency line. And their next step basically is to maintain their existing hours of operation, which is Monday through Friday 8-5, but expanding their employee base so they can accommodate about 91,000 more calls per year. That’s going to have a substantial impact. And if we’re able to effectively create a public education, public awareness campaign -- so that our community members know when to call 911 for an emergency, but to call 311 for non-emergencies -- that would have a dramatic impact.

Miller: What are examples? We have about a minute left, but what would you want Portlanders to know, the different categories they should have in their minds of when to call 911 and when to call 311?

Cozzie: Yeah, 911 is [for] “in progress emergency,” “life and death emergency,” or “immediate danger to property.” When you look at something that may have just occurred, our window would be about 10 minutes. So, if somebody had broken into your house, they’re no longer there but they just left, that would be a 911 emergency. But if someone had broken into your house the night before and it’s been 24 hours since they had been there, that would be a non-emergency.

Miller: Bob Cozzie. Thanks very much for joining us today.

Cozzie: Absolutely. Thank you.

Miller: Bob Cozzie is the director of Portland’s Bureau of Emergency Communications.

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