Let’s cut through all the rhetoric for a moment, please. “Police priority dispatch” is not County Executive Kathleen Falk’s attempt to humiliate her underlings at the 911 Center into submission. To support PPD, you do not need to believe the 911 Center has been complicit in a murder or negligent in any way. You just need to believe a 911 Center regularizing police dispatches instead of bringing human error into the process is an objectively better framework.

How will PPD work? The details, admittedly, need to be worked out. But whatever the final proposed policy looks like, it will involve the deliberate regularization of protocol around the automatic dispatching of all “dropped” 911 calls, which yield no response upon operator callback. This strikes me as a perfectly reasonable step to reduce operator error, especially since police personnel will still be able to exercise discretion over which dispatched calls to address first. PPD is utilized with great success across the country, and it belongs in Madison.

Questions abound, though. The 911 operators are worried (and more than a little peeved) about the prospect of converting to a new, more regularized program. Indeed, several years of training will be required before PPD is fully incorporated into the 911 Center. Veteran operators feel especially affronted by the suggestion they need new protocol. But consider that at least one such veteran operator — Rita Gahagan, who mishandled the final 911 call from Brittany Zimmermann’s cell phone — will spend the rest of her life wondering what went wrong on her end. Nobody should have to endure that, and if the decision to dispatch had been predetermined, a lot of after-the-fact emotional suffering might have been avoided. The buck should not even appear to stop at Rita Gahagan. Most places of employment, especially with responsibilities as serious as the 911 Center, owe their employees standardized procedural instructions.

Then there’s the issue of police resources. Capt. Joe Balles, cited in a recent Herald article (“MPD has concerns about 911 auto-dispatch” Feb. 16), expressed concern that the county will not have enough manpower to respond to all dispatched calls. Here’s where Falk’s office needs to be crystal-clear: The 911 center cannot order police officers to respond to dispatched calls. But it can dispatch the calls according to a predetermined prioritization scheme, trusting the officers to use appropriate discretion.

It is true this displaces the responsibility of discretion from 911 operators to police officers receiving the dispatch. But with all due respect to the 911 Center, I would sleep better at night with this discretion solidly in police officers’ hands. It is more ethical to put it there — more consistent with the way society thinks about law enforcement. Police officers, in serving their communities, make a conscious decision to bear responsibility for clutch decisions on the beat. Their psychological training has braced them for the possibility of making irreparable errors. The same cannot be said for 911 operators.

Police personnel may have valid concerns not just about the way PPD prioritizes 911 calls but also about the procedural norms they would be expected (if not exactly required) to follow. Some of the discussion surrounding PPD has acted as if Kathleen Falk has already determined all the organizational details, as if she had the power to implement PPD at her whim. Quite the contrary. PPD is a recommendation from the County Executive to be considered and negotiated over several months, and it can only be authorized by the 911 Center Board. Many voices will be brought to the table as the county crafts a reasonable policy that works for all municipalities without overstretching police resources. The final version of the PPD policy is still negotiable at this stage. This is exactly as it should be.

Falk’s office could admittedly do a better job advertising this open invitation to negotiate and deliberate the best possible PPD policy for the county. It is still unclear, from press releases and news reports alone, what PPD even entails (much research was necessary for this piece, including a call to Falk’s office). But the ambiguity and uncertainty of the proposal at this stage should at least shield Falk from the unfair accusation of hammering through changes to clear her name after the Zimmermann case.

Even when all voices are brought to the table, some might still act like the sky is falling as a result of this proposal. Newsflash to Capt. Balles et al: The sky is not falling because Kathleen Falk is proposing PPD. The sky has been falling for about 10 months, ever since the Brittany Zimmermann murder exposed the possibility for human error at the 911 Center. And the sky will only stop falling when the public regains trust in our emergency-response services.

Eric Schmidt ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in political science and legal studies.