Others put the onus on elected officials. While the chief rallies for additional resources, Ohta said she wonders whether the department could use its budget more effectively. "This department should be somewhere around 1,100 officers in order to meet the demand of calls for service, as well as violence in the community," Armstrong said, suggesting he wants to nearly double the police force. "You can see how calls could begin to stack," Armstrong said. Since onset of the pandemic, homicides have ticked up: by 20% at the end of 2020, and another 20% at the end of 2021.Īs a result, Armstrong said, police scramble to manage other emergency calls. He noted that each homicide might require as many as nine officers to manage the scene and the investigation for several hours - essentially dedicating a third of the citywide patrols to one incident. "It's clear that we're responding to more shootings and more homicides, more serious calls, more violent calls, more calls where people are injured," Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong said in an interview. Oliver expected to surpass a million 911 calls at the end of the year. This year, the center fielded 86,718 calls by the end of April - up from 68,471 over the same period last year. Oliver said she's trying to hire and train people as quickly as possible, but many people who apply quickly discover they cannot bear the grueling work and emotional intensity of the job, and some leave for cities with fewer emergencies. The center is painfully understaffed, with 59 positions filled out of 77 budgeted, while the Police Department also grapples with what some officials have deemed a dire staffing shortage: As of May 4, the department had 669 officers, or 15 for every 10,000 people - commensurate with Richmond but significantly less than the 26 officers per capita in San Francisco. "All this, and there's probably nobody to break," Oliver said, shaking her head, fearing that at the moment she had no officers available to help the carjacking victim. In East Oakland, residents began calling to report gunfire nine minutes later. Inside the center, 13 dispatchers sat at consoles, sifting through a backlog of 230 calls, many held over from the night before when police were tied up with a massive sideshow.Ĭommunications manager Eugenia Oliver stood before a set of screens resembling the frenetic monitors in a stock exchange: one showed all the backed-up calls, another the 41 priority calls for serious incidents, such as a death at 40th Avenue and International Boulevard that drew five officers and a lieutenant to the scene, or the carjacking in West Oakland, or the alleged kidnapping in Fruitvale.Īnother screen showed activations of Oakland's ShotSpotter gunfire detectors: At 8:16 p.m., someone shot 15 rounds from a high-capacity firearm on Coolidge Avenue. on a recent Friday night, signs in the department's communications division in East Oakland instructed "No 950 citywide" - a police radio code signifying that officers should respond only to the most critical calls for crimes in progress. This practice appears to be routine: At 8 p.m. 23 last year, there were 115 instances in which Oakland's communications center got so overburdened with 911 calls that dispatchers had to triage, sending officers only to emergencies that presented an imminent danger. Records obtained by The Chronicle show that from Jan. An Alameda County civil grand jury investigation published in 2020 found that Oakland's "underfunded and understaffed 911 communications center can not manage the volume of emergency and non-emergency calls it receives, putting the public's safety at risk."Īmong the grand jury's findings were unsettling wait times to reach a 911 operator: In 2019, nearly 40% of callers could not reach an operator within the state standard time of 15 seconds, and more than 18,000 callers had to wait more than two minutes - a lag that likely prompted 13,800 callers to hang up, the report said. when you called hours ago," said Paige Thomas, who lives in the San Antonio district and who described 911 in Oakland as a "quagmire": long holds, overwhelmed dispatchers, police responses so slow that people eventually give up.Ĭity officials acknowledge that Oakland's 911 system has long been inadequate, though it's reached a critical point in recent years. "The cops are always showing up at your house at 3 a.m. They handed Ohta a slip of paper with a report number and left. Another six hours passed before two officers rolled up to Ohta's house, determined the Yukon was stolen, and told her the driver "was long gone, so I shouldn't worry about it," Ohta said.
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