A new investigation by the city auditor has found that Oakland’s 911 call center is understaffed, calls aren’t picked up quickly, language barriers prevent fast intake of calls, and serious crimes aren’t being quickly responded to by officers in East Oakland, among other problems.
Issues with Oakland’s 911 system have been well documented in recent years. A previous city audit from 2017 found that Oakland wasn’t meeting the state-mandated response times. The Alameda County Grand Jury published reports identifying the same problem in 2020 and 2023. In July 2023, the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services warned that Oakland risked losing state funding if it didn’t improve its response times. The city began showing improvement last year, prompting the state to withdraw its threat.
City Auditor Michael Houston’s latest review examined police call data from January 2019 through December 2024.
According to the report:
Poor staffing and out-of-date staffing protocols are the main reasons Oakland has repeatedly missed state targets for answering emergency calls within 15 seconds.
OPD is slower to answer 911 calls than seven other cities with similar populations and crime rates. The time it takes Oakland dispatchers to answer calls also fluctuates wildly over the course of the day compared to other cities.
OPD struggles to accommodate callers who don’t speak English and relies heavily on third-party interpreters. These calls are an average of five minutes longer than calls in English.
Unlike some of its peer cities, Oakland doesn’t have target response times for the most urgent calls, including those that involve violent crimes.
The city’s police beat boundaries have inadvertently created slower response times to serious crimes reported in East Oakland.
The main recommendations in Houston’s latest report echo those from 2017, calling for staffing improvements. The auditor is urging the city to make sure the minimum staffing in the emergency call center changes over the course of the day to accurately reflect the volume of calls, and to hire more bilingual dispatchers. Houston is also recommending that Oakland update its police beat boundaries and adopt a handful of tech solutions that will make calls run more smoothly.
“Oaklanders deserve a 911 system that responds quickly and reliably every time — and our audit lays out how the City can make that happen,” Houston said in a press release.
The Oakland Police Department didn’t immediately respond to an interview request from The Oaklandside about the auditor’s report.
In an appendix to the report, OPD officials agreed that it would be a good idea to work with the city administrator and union representatives to figure out how to increase coverage by bilingual dispatchers and to adopt targets for each stage of its response time to calls. But the department noted some limitations, such as not having the technical ability to track or report calls for services involving non-English speakers.
Oakland dispatchers are understaffed and answer times fluctuates a lot
The state of California requires 90% of 911 calls to be answered within 15 seconds, and 95% of calls must be answered within 20 seconds. Failing to meet these standards can cost local jurisdictions state funding.
The auditor reported that Oakland’s police 911 center has mostly failed to meet state targets. Since 2014, OPD has met state targets only once, in 2017.
Between 2020 and 2024, the volume of emergency calls in Oakland has grown by an average of 10% each year.
In 2024, Oakland’s dispatch center answered 54% of calls within 15 seconds and 57% of calls within 20 seconds. In 2023 — Oakland’s worst year in a decade — OPD answered only 42% of calls within 15 seconds.
One of the auditor’s most striking findings is that the time it takes Oakland dispatchers to answer calls varies wildly depending on the time of day. In 2023, OPD answered an average of 74% of 911 calls within 15 seconds around the 5 a.m. mark. By 8 a.m., the department only answered an average of 35% of calls within 15 seconds. This is not the case for Oakland’s peer cities, where the auditor generally found more consistency with how long it takes dispatchers to answer the phone, regardless of whether it’s morning or evening.
The longer it takes to answer a 911 call, the longer it takes for an officer to respond to the scene of a crime. The auditor found that longer response times resulted in cancelled calls, but also prompted some residents to call back repeatedly seeking updates, which further burdened dispatchers.
The auditor blamed the lackluster performance on chronic understaffing and recommended that OPD adjust staffing levels to reflect the recent increase in call volume.
In 2019, the police department determined that its emergency communications center needed to increase its staffing to a minimum of 105 full-time positions, including 90 dispatchers.
Oakland isn’t alone in the staffing crisis: Bakersfield, Sacramento, San Jose, and San Francisco have reported problems with hiring and retaining dispatchers. And a national survey in 2024 by the National Emergency Numbers Association found that 82% of surveyed emergency communications centers struggle with vacancies. Despite this shared challenge, other jurisdictions are outperforming Oakland, which suggests “other factors may be affecting the Police Department’s performance,” the auditor wrote.
Oakland needs to better serve 911 callers who don’t speak English
Roughly 41% of Oakland’s more than 180,000 households speak a language other than English. Oakland law requires city departments to make sure services are accessible in other languages spoken by a “substantial number” of people in the city, which is defined as at least 10,000 residents. Currently, this includes Spanish, Cantonese, and Mandarin.
According to the auditor’s report, Oakland has two Cantonese-speaking dispatchers, 15 Spanish-speakers, and one Laotian speaker. Interpreters are hired through a state vendor called CyraCom International Inc.
The number of 911 calls that require an interpreter has been growing steadily over the past five years. In 2019, the city fielded 9,000 calls that required interpretation. In 2024, Oakland handled over 17,000 in 41 languages. Most of the calls — 89% — were in Spanish.
Calls that require an interpreter are five minutes longer on average, the auditor found. The amount of time it takes to connect with an interpreter also varies by language. In 2024, it took an average of 15 seconds to link with a Spanish interpreter, but nearly 30 seconds to get a Vietnamese one.
The auditor recommends that OPD track and report on calls in languages other than English, adjust the number of bilingual dispatchers, and update its language access policy to clarify how dispatchers should handle limited-English speakers. According to the audit, OPD has exceeded its goal for hiring Spanish-speaking staff but is still short of Chinese-speaking employees.
Oakland needs to reorganize its beats
Oakland is geographically divided into nearly three dozen police beats, which operate in two different bureaus: east and west. According to the audit, the east bureau experienced longer response times than the west bureau for Priority 2 calls, which are urgent but not emergencies. In 2022, the median time to dispatch a priority 2 call in the east bureau was two hours longer than in the west, even though overall call volume between the two bureaus was roughly the same during this period. The east bureau, however, had 4,000 more Priority 1 calls, which are more serious and often require more officers to address.
To address this disparity, the auditor recommends that OPD update its beat boundaries to reflect the volume of calls and other factors. The office also recommends that OPD activate the GPS technology installed in its patrol cars. This technology would help the department automatically calculate the closest unit to respond to Priority 1 calls, and it would generate better response time data.
Another overarching problem identified by the auditor is that OPD doesn’t have goals for its response times. By contrast, San Jose and San Francisco have both established response time targets for different priority calls. Some neighboring cities also publish regular reports about response time performance, which Oakland does not. The auditor recommended that OPD adopt these practices.
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