The 911 dispatch center in Bergen County, New Jersey. Hundreds of millions of 911 calls pour into the country’s roughly…
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broader crisis unfolding at call centers across the US that 911 professionals and experts now say is fueled by burnout, outdated technology and chronic underfunding.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 not recognized 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 estimated 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 recent survey 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 reported 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 actual emergencies, 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 reliant 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 CNN affiliate WJLA.
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 most advanced 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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