A member of the D.C. Council who called 911 early Friday as a woman was being attacked outside his front door was harassed by a call taker who at one point asked if he was drunk, he said Friday.
At 1:15 a.m. Friday, At-large Councilman David Catania was awakened by the muffled screams of a woman “pleading for her life,” he said. Admittedly disoriented, he grabbed his phone and called 911, he said, and was confronted by a woman who “loved her words more than her mission” and spoke in a “textbook badgering style.” At one point he claimed the woman asked if he was drunk.
“I was so off put it made it more difficult to collect my thoughts,” Catania said during an oversight hearing of the Office of Unified Communications. “All the while a woman is screaming bloody murder 100 feet from my front door.”
Janice Quintana, director of the office, said she listened to the tape and described Catania as “frantic.”
“She was trying to ascertain information and she was trying to calm you down,” Quintana said. “You gave an address and I couldn’t hear.”
To which Catania responded: “We cannot have people like this employed by this government.”
Catania’s neighbors called 911 as well and police responded quickly, the councilman said.
Roughly 1,000 calls a week to D.C.’s call center are being monitored for quality, Quintana told the public safety panel, chaired by Councilman Phil Mendelson. But council members said they hear the same complaints over and over – of police who don’t show up, of call takers who are rude and ask too many questions, and of phones that are never answered.
“People constantly say they call 911 and an officer either doesn’t respond or an officer responds late,” said Ward 2 Councilman Jack Evans. “Somewhere the system is still not working even after all the money we’ve put into this.”
The call center handled 2.5 million calls in fiscal 2007 to 911, 311 and 727-1000. Quintana could not say what percentage of the monitored calls are poorly handled, but employees havebeen taken off the phones for training or disciplinary action.
“They really know that their job is serious and there are repercussions,” Quintana said of her staff.
