Police Investigate 911 Call Center Outages After Concern About Emergency Response

WASHINGTON -- Washington, D.C., police are investigating whether recent outages of the city’s 911 emergency call center might have been done intentionally.

So far this year, there have been seven outages of the Office of Unified Communications computer system.

City officials continue to express anger over the death by cardiac arrest on Aug. 2 of an infant in Northwest D.C. during an outage. His parents say the response by paramedics appears to have been slowed by 911 computer problems.

D.C. Council member Brianne Nadeau said the outages demonstrated “a perfect storm of government incompetence.”

When the computer system is down, dispatchers of first responders must use pencil and paper to keep track of their calls for help.

The most recent outage was Aug. 12. Call center administrators blamed it on a “connectivity disruption” caused by hardware that hosts the Computer Assisted Dispatch software.

Of the seven outages, five were attributed to connectivity issues. Another one was planned as part of a computer upgrade. The other resulted from the global CrowdStrike outage in July.

Police are focusing their inquiry on why computer contractors have been unable to resolve the connectivity problems.

They also are checking into staffing problems. In July 2023, the Office of Unified Communications reported that 33 percent of its shifts operated below minimum staffing levels. By last month, the percentage had risen to 88 percent.

For more information, contact The Legal Forum (www.legal-forum.net) at email: [email protected] or phone: 202-479-7240.