MACON, Ga. — Edwin Iwo was at the wheel of his Dodge SUV, cutting through the Vineville neighborhood one Sunday evening in January when the unexpected occurred.
At the stop sign on Belvedere Drive and Ridge Avenue, a Honda Civic slammed into the passenger side of his car. The Civic’s airbags inflated with the crunch of metal. A few minutes later, a woman got out of the crumpled car and sat on the curb.
Iwo called 911 about 4:11 p.m. The woman called 911, too. Two others who stopped upon witnessing the crash also called 911, Iwo said.
“I waited and waited and waited. I waited for more than one hour,” Iwo, 65, told The Macon Newsroom in April.
Still, there was no sign of an ambulance, patrol car or fire truck until more than two hours later.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Iwo said. “If someone was in bad shape, terrible things would have happened.”
Iwo has lived in Macon since 1983. He said he has called 911 a few times over the decades but that was the longest he had ever waited for a response.
Iwo said he did not know who to complain to about the response time. A check with the Bibb County Sheriff’s Office didn’t turn up any records of an emergency situation that evening that could have been the cause of the delayed response.
County Manager Keith Moffett said the county has been made aware of several complaints about slow 911 response times. That is, in part, why Macon-Bibb County said it quietly relinquished oversight of the E-911 center and assigned it to the sheriff’s office in early March. The E-911 center had been a county department since 2014 when Macon and Bibb County consolidated.
E-911 center employees had answered to Moffett, but are now under Bibb County Sheriff David Davis.
“It was decided that (we would) have a more efficient system if we just have one manager over the whole process from the entire time we received the call to the deputy getting over the scene,” Moffett said.
Bibb County Sheriff’s Chief Deputy Michael Scarbary said he didn’t know why the E-911 Center was designated a county department since law enforcement agencies and the fire department have historically had direct oversight over local 911 call centers prior to consolidation.
“We should have always been under the same umbrella,” Scarbary said. “Any problems we have, we can bring our officers and our command staff from our patrol units and with the Bibb 911 supervisors we can address the issues.”
The sheriff’s office is in the process evaluating the center’s current policies and directives for needed changes, he said.
“Right now, I’m trying to get a lay of the land of what’s been going on and to kind of see what we can do to correct some things and continue to do what things they are doing,” Scarbary said.
DEPARTURE OF E-911 DIRECTOR
The decision to transfer oversight of the E-911 call center was made about the same time as the county fired its E-911 director. An interim director is working until the sheriff’s office can hire a new one.
Moffett wrote to E-911 Director Shandel Graham on March 7 to inform her she was being fired but would receive paid leave through March 18. Moffett said the letter came after the county became aware of online chatter and word of mouth complaints about slow 911 response times.
“You know, with all leadership, you do have performance evaluations that come up from time to time,” Moffett said.
But open records requests to the county did not return any written record of evaluations of job performance for Graham, who was named interim director of the E-911 Center in November 2018 and appointed director in August 2019.
County spokesman Chris Floore said Graham verbally tendered her own resignation soon after Moffett’s letter.
RESPONSE TIMES HARD TO QUANTIFY
When E-911 was under county oversight, Moffett said his only responsibility was to ensure 911 calls were answered within the first three rings and “probably like 95% of all calls were.”
However, when it comes to evaluating average response times for deputies, ambulances and fire trucks, the county had no mechanism to determine if overall operations were sufficient. The technology it used only allows the county to evaluate response times for each individual 911 call.
When someone calls 911, a dispatcher is supposed to answer and pass word along to the sheriff’s office, the fire department and ambulance operators. Each of those agencies are then responsible for dispatching their own vehicles to a scene.
The Macon Newsroom requested statistics describing call response times across the entire Bibb County Sheriff’s Office. The sheriff’s office said system-wide records don’t exist but could be cobbled together from other data for a $75 fee. Floore said the E-911 center keeps data in a call-by-call format in its CAD system, which records the time the 911 call, the time it was answered by an operator and transferred to the appropriate departments, the time those departments dispatch vehicles and the time of arrival at the scene.
Moffett said some complaints he was made aware of are centered on the time it took dispatchers to get information to the sheriff’s office so it could send a deputy to respond.
Ambulance services are different. The county is divided into two regions served by either Atrium Health Navicent ambulances or Community Ambulance Services Inc., Floore said. Since emergency medical services providers are not equipped with the same Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) system as police and fire, Floore said a 911 operator calls each company and “stays on the phone until someone talks to them.” Ambulance response times are not automatically reported by E-911 because EMS responders must call back to notify the 911 center of its arrival.
Still, Moffett said, the community needs to change its expectations about how quickly help will arrive.
“When you call 911, you have the expectation that deputies are gonna get on the scene immediately and the process doesn’t work that way,” Moffett said. “If it’s a traffic call and then somebody calls at the same time with a home invasion, that deputy may get pulled and he has to go take care of that priority call and then somebody else gets reassigned to the traffic call.”
Moffett said all of that can mean a wait for help.
The Macon Newsroom analyzed response times for each of the 17 pedestrian deaths in the county in 2021. Read our findings here.
Civic Journalism Fellow Laura Corley writes about public safety, health and education for The Macon Newsroom. To contact her, email Corley_le@mercer.edu or call 478-301-5777.
