More than 100 emergency dispatchers and city workers gathered outside the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management (SFDEM) building at Turk and Laguna streets Wednesday afternoon to protest low staffing levels.
Emergency dispatchers — city workers who answer 911 calls and route them to the correct public safety agency — took to the street holding picket signs (“911, Do you have an emergency? Please hold!”) and chanting slogans (“What do we want? More dispatchers! When do we want it? Now!”).
One 911 dispatcher, Ron Davis, said that workers are regularly forced to work overtime “just to get us to minimum staffing levels.” Even when dispatchers work forced overtime, weekends and holidays, he said, the department is still sometimes below what he called minimum staffing levels. "We want the city to hire more dispatchers,” he said.
“I don’t go out on holidays with my family, because I’m afraid if there’s an emergency and I call 911, I’ll sit on hold,” he said, speaking to a raucous crowd of protesters. “There should be enough people to answer 911 calls.”
When there aren’t enough people to answer those calls, the callers are placed on hold. In California, there is a mandatory standard that all 911 calls be answered within 10 seconds. According to the protesting dispatchers, San Francisco doesn't always meet that standard. (Compliance drops to as low as 60 percent at some times of day, according to a release put out by the group.)
In addition to calls being placed on hold, understaffing increases the overall stress of an already stressful job, dispatch supervisor Anne Raskin said. She said that when a 911 call is placed on hold, a bell rings in the dispatch center within the SFDEM building. “The bell rings almost all day long. … It's stressful enough without having to go from call to call to call without time in between to recuperate.”