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By Letters to the Editor
Tuesday, September 16, 2008 12:00 a.m.

2 Vote 0 Votes

Ryan Greenfield’s column in the Herald regarding the Dane County Public Safety Communications (911) Center (“Broken center in need of overhaul,” Sept. 9) contained numerous factual inaccuracies.

For fear of compromising the investigation and their ability to rule out potential suspects, detectives and command staff with the Madison Police Department in person, over the phone, and in writing told administrators in the 911 Center and my staff on numerous occasions not to release information regarding the 911 call placed from Brittany Zimmermann’s cell phone on April 2 of this year. Not wanting to jeopardize the police department’s ability to catch the person or persons responsible for the brutal killing of a young woman is not a “cover-up” as the writer asserts.

I directed an investigation by 911 Center management into the handling of this call. The dispatcher who took the call made a mistake and should have tried to call back; it’s not possible to know if anyone would have answered. I promptly apologized on behalf of the entire county to Ms. Zimmermann’s family and fiance.

Until recently there was no formal policy requiring Madison police to respond to wireless 911 calls in which dispatchers were unable to determine if an emergency existed on the other end of the phone. Working with police to create such a policy was one of my initial directives to the 911 Center Director in the wake of this tragedy.

The Dane County 911 Center documents and thoroughly investigates every complaint received both from citizens and the police, fire and emergency medical services agencies it serves. These complaints are presented to the 911 Center Board for review on a regular basis. Twenty-one complaints were filed in 2007; not one was received from the Madison Police Department that year.

The Dane County 911 Center has the most advanced technology available in the industry to help locate the origin of 911 calls that come from cell phones. Dane County, in fact, was one of the first to deploy this technology made available by cell phone providers. The accuracy of this technology depends on the type of cell phone a person has and his or her provider. Our 911 Center regularly uses this technology to, as the writer states, “triangulate” the source of calls. Like any other kind of new technology, it is rapidly evolving and advancing, but in Dane County we are ahead of the curve. If it’s been made, we have it.

The Dane County 911 Center receives more than 660,000 calls a year. A recent analysis of those calls showed they’re being answered on average within 1.5 rings.

By linking people with critical public safety services hundreds of times each day, our 911 Center is saving lives.

UW students should know if they need help, a team of hard-working, dedicated professional dispatchers will be on the other end of their emergency call.

Kathleen Falk

Dane County Executive

Falk@co.dane.wi.us


2 Comments | Leave a comment

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Anonymous | September 16, 2008 9:45 AM | Reply

“Until recently there was no formal policy requiring Madison police to respond to wireless 911 calls”

so in a town where at least 35,000+ don’t have land lines it ok not to have a plan? and don’t lie the fact of the matter is people see movies and think you can just trace a cell phone on a pretty live updated sat map. E911 is still a weak system in this case since she was in a building the AGPS is on her phone would not have worked, the best you could do was to triangulate her position with in maybe 25ft (required 3+ towers and the factoring in distortion from buildings and such). So Kathleen Falk, be honest if you get a call from some one in a building with say 2 or less bars of service from their cell phone provider how well can you locate them?

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Anonymous | September 16, 2008 9:52 PM | Reply

“Promptly apologised”? If one considers several weeks of first stonewalling the press and truth to be prompt, I auppose that might be true.

I’m also curious why, if the 911 center has the most up-to-date software and equipment available, Ms. Falk is proposing several hundred thousand dollars of software and equipment upgrades in her budget? She’s either misleading the public again, or proposing to waste money. Which is is, Ms. Falk>

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