OAKLAND — Applications from hundreds of prospective 911 dispatchers who could have helped speed up Oakland’s notoriously slow response times to emergency calls piled up at the city’s Human Resources department, and some went unprocessed for months, city officials acknowledged this week.
Between April 2022 and April 2023, the applications were all but ignored, further stressing a glitchy emergency dispatch system that earlier this year led California to threaten to have an outside company handle Oakland’s emergency calls.
The problem was first detected by a city audit amid a transition between the administrations of Mayor Libby Schaaf and Mayor Sheng Thao, months before a report by the Alameda County Civil Grand Jury pilloried the city’s disproportionately slow 911 response.
But vacancies have nonetheless climbed each month of this year within the dispatch ranks, represented by SEIU Local 1021 and officially employed by the Oakland Police Department. There currently are 20 unfilled positions out of a total 76.
“This is something we don’t take lightly,” city administrator Jestin Johnson said at a City Council meeting Tuesday. “We want to have qualified applicants apply for roles in the city — that piece is so critical.”
City officials said the Human Resources staffers in question were no longer employed by the time the audit uncovered the unprocessed applications. It’s unclear if the issue stretches to other departments.
At least some of the problem, officials said, can be traced to Human Resources’ previous method of recruiting dispatchers.
It involved beginning a new recruitment cycle every month that led the same people to apply multiple different times — an artificial ballooning of submitted applications that created a backlog in the department.
In a report this week, the staff pledged to streamline parts of the recruitment process so that the problem isn’t repeated.
“Recruiting for these important positions is a high priority for the City of Oakland, and the City recognizes the negative impact of these unprocessed applications,” the city said in a statement.
The issue drew the attention of City Councilmember Janani Ramachandran, who obtained public records from the city that suggest the number of unprocessed applications amounted to 1,000 during that period.
Some of the applicants, she said, have reached out to her personally after never hearing back from the city.
“At least the applicants that have reached out to me, they’re Oakland residents,” said Ramachandran at Tuesday’s council meeting. “These are primarily women of color who are applying, who have all sorts of qualifications and backgrounds and really are committed to wanting to serve the city of Oakland.”
“Many of them are the same people who have to wait on 911 in their moment of crisis,” the council member added.
A lack of adequate 911 staffing is an issue across Alameda County, with 82% of call centers reporting being understaffed in a survey this year by the National Emergency Number Association.
“The stress of the job is compounded in large part by the fact that not all centers are staffed appropriately,” Brian Fontes, CEO of the organization that conducted the survey, told USA Today.
The same survey found that 60% of dispatch centers reported having outages due to technology deficiencies — a familiar problem in Oakland where on two occasions this summer the 911 system failed due to glitches, including once for 26 hours.
In July, the state’s Office of Emergency Services sent a letter to the city threatening to pull funding for Oakland’s 911 dispatch and redirect emergency calls elsewhere if the city did not begin responding to 90% of all calls within 15 seconds. At the time, Oakland was hitting that mark for just 46.22% of calls.
Weeks later, Mayor Thao announced that the city would tap $2 million in extra revenues generated from taxes at the Oakland Coliseum and put it toward 911 response.
“Response times have been a longstanding issue for the city — we know this, but we do not accept that this is good enough,” Thao said at the time. “These steps will help us improve the response times, better serve Oaklanders and, of course, make our city safer.”
Most 911 calls go to the police’s Emergency Communications Center. On average, 10% of those involve a fire or medical emergency, 30% warrant police dispatch, and the rest are miscellaneous or crank calls and non-emergency requests, the Alameda County Civil Grand Jury reported earlier this year.
The number of 911 calls in Oakland have risen each of the past three years, a trend that tracks with a recent spike in burglaries and robberies.
In 2022, the city’s police recorded 1 million dispatch calls for the first time ever, according to data collected by the police officers’ union. On Halloween night this year, the city had already surpassed that mark. In order to handle them, the city will have to figure out how to fill the 25% of 911 dispatcher positions that remain vacant.
“The HR process that’s noted in this review shows a lack of transparency,” said Councilmember Treva Reid on Tuesday, “and a concerning trend of a lack of urgency … to ensure that we have a sustained and fully staffed 911 team with the support that’s certainly needed internally.”