Edgar Co. (ECWd) –
We covered the alleged investigation into the botched dispatch call of a shooting at the White Oak Park in Paris, Illinois, in this article.
As referenced in the prior article, the policy requires “9-1-1 Telecommunicators will read and have working knowledge of 9-1-1 operating procedures.”
We submitted another Freedom of Information Act request for a specific record: the CAD system screenshots. For those not familiar with this system, the system has a series of buttons that can be selected for the types of calls received, and once any specific button is selected, a list of questions pop up on the screen for the dispatcher to follow.
1. A copy of the screen captures on the CAD system for the three 911 calls tied to the White Oak Park shooting incident. The captures I am seeking are those that have the key questions that pop up when a specific type of call button is selected.
The response appears to indicate a policy failure by the dispatchers, yet the investigation claimed insufficient evidence of a policy violation.
” I would love to send you the requested information; however, the dispatchers used the incident code “assist public” which does not prompt Total Response Protocols to pop up.” (emphasis added)
So, when a dispatcher can hear gunshots in the background, and the caller is claiming “they are trying to kill us”, then does not select the appropriate call type button which would bring up “Total Response Protocols”, we believe most would find that to be sufficient evidence of a policy violation. However, the investigation would have had to have actually taken the steps we did to get to the bottom of what did or did not take place.
We guess that reading and having a working knowledge of the 911 operating procedures does not mean you should follow the appropriate call type selection so that the key pop-ups on the screen get activated and followed.
Maybe an outside investigation into the matter, rather than an internal one, would see the forest through the trees.
