LAPD Tackles 911 Bilingual Response Time : Safety: The city directs LAPD to enhance system as calls from non-English speakers continue to rise, posing more risks.

The memory of a little girl who died after being shot in the head still haunts 911 emergency operator Norma Torres.

Two summers ago, an emergency call from a Spanish-speaking Hollywood resident came into the Los Angeles Police Department’s 911 headquarters, four floors underground at City Hall.

No one knows exactly what time the domestic dispute call was made that night. No one is sure how long the caller, apparently one of the 11-year-old girl’s relatives, had to wait for someone who spoke Spanish.

And while no one can say that faster service would have saved the girl’s life, Torres and others say the tragedy underscores their belief that the city’s overworked 911 system is especially poor at meeting the emergency needs of non-English-speaking residents.

Police communications officials acknowledge that on any given shift, only four operators are assigned specifically to handle calls from Spanish speakers.

And while the goal is to answer all 911 calls within nine seconds, some Spanish-speakers may wait more than 20 minutes to reach an operator who will understand how to help them in a time of emergency, officials say.

Eager to avoid tragedies in a region where hundreds of thousands of residents speak only Spanish or another language besides English, the City Council has directed the LAPD to move forward with immediate changes to the emergency response system. Those changes include:

* Hiring more bilingual 911 operators, known as police service representatives.

* Upgrading the bilingual system so that quality of service may be measured and calls may be prioritized the same as English-language calls.

* Exploring allegations of a hostile work environment for bilingual operators.

* Finding new ways to educate residents on the proper use of 911.

“The 911 service is a constant complaint that we get,” said Councilman Richard Alarcon, who represents the largely Latino northeast San Fernando Valley and introduced the council action. “It cuts across all communities.”

Torres, 30, a four-year veteran at answering emergency calls, said that by the time the Hollywood call was patched in to her and answered, all she could hear was a thumping sound on the other end.

It was learned later that the girl’s mother ran out of their apartment frightened by a former lover who was coming after her carrying a gun. The man grabbed the girl, tried to force her to say where her mother went, and then, frustrated, shot her five times.

“The banging was the little girl’s head against the wall,” Torres said her eyes widening in disbelief. “. . . I think now that we’re making changes I remember that.”

Capt. Thomas D. Elfmont, commanding officer of the LAPD’s communications division, said the 911 system is improving but needs more staff in order to service all callers properly.

Elfmont said there are 60 to 100 operators working the phones on any given shift, with up to 12 taking only 911 calls and up to four assigned specifically to handling calls from Spanish speakers. The rest may be responding to emergencies, routine calls ranging from home alarms to crime reports or helping officers in the field, so-called secondary calls, he said.

The division has had no increase in personnel during the past 10 years despite a 70% increase in calls during that time, Elfmont said.

“My position is that anything we can do to improve service is something that we want to do,” Elfmont said. “We are short of personnel so there are times when we do not answer the calls as quickly as we would like.”

Elfmont said the division currently answers 80% to 85% of all 911 calls within nine seconds of the first ring, while secondary calls normally are answered in about three or four minutes. The goal is to answer 100% of all 911 calls within nine seconds and all secondary calls within 20 to 30 seconds, he said.

During one recent night shift, the need for Spanish-speaking operators was evident as 911 and lower priority calls poured into the communications division.

Monolingual workers unable to understand callers quickly would try, “Habla espanol? “ (Do you speak Spanish?) or “Un momento por favor “ (One moment please).

*

Yvette Binns, 33, one operator doing her best to handle or transfer calls, said her year on the job has emphasized the need for more bilingual operators.

“They need it. We get a lot,” she said, referring to non-English-speaking callers. “Me? I don’t understand. I think there’s a definite need.”

Lillian Brock, a senior police service representative, said there has been an increase in non-English callers from all parts of the city.

“Our Spanish speakers are getting calls from all over,” Brock said. “We probably could also use a Korean speaker.”

The communications division, which received almost 4.9 million calls during 1994, was able to answer about 3.9 million of those calls, about 79%. Some callers hang up quickly, but the division’s goal remains coming as close as possible to answering 100% of the calls.

City officials consider the department’s count of calls to Spanish operators, more than 420,000 in 1994, significantly low although an exact count is impossible to obtain.

Under the current system, incoming calls that are handled first by a 911 operator who must then transfer them to a Spanish speaker are not included in the count because the department does not count transfers from one operator console to another.

That practice, coupled with the lack of a system that prioritizes Spanish-language calls once they are transferred to a Spanish-speaking operator, results in some callers waiting more than 20 minutes regardless of their needs.

It also means that accurately measuring the amount of work handled by bilingual operators is difficult, a situation that has caused friction at least partly because bilingual workers receive a 5.5% bonus above the regular operator’s salary of $36,000 to $42,000.

Among the City Council directives was for the city’s personnel department to determine the validity of complaints that bilingual workers face a hostile work environment. Also monitoring the situation is the Los Angeles City Employees Chicano Assn., an employee advocacy group.

Jacqueline Zarate, association president, said an already stressful job has been made more difficult for bilingual police service representatives in the past through petty practices by some workers who refer to “real PSRs” separately from “bilingual PSRs.” Other complaints by bilingual operators came when several monolingual workers allegedly cheered the recent reduction of bilingual bonuses, Zarate said.

“Their work is not appreciated. They feel like second-class citizens,” Zarate said. “It’s very frustrating.

“That’s the kind of stuff we consider a hostile environment,” she said. “You can’t tell me that doesn’t have an impact over time.”

The association also is promoting the need for more bilingual supervisors.

Torres said getting a supervisor’s job requires extensive experience at all the jobs she and others were trained to perform. That has not happened enough because bilingual operators usually are needed at the Spanish consoles, she said.

“We want to be able to do all the jobs,” she said. “If you’re not exposed to the job, how are you going to supervise somebody who is? We’ve learned everything but we haven’t been given the opportunity to practice it like everybody else.”

Elfmont said there are 36 senior police service representatives. Of those, one is fluent in Spanish and another is considered able to communicate in Spanish, he said.

As more workers are hired and more consoles are added to the system, additional opportunities will exist so that bilingual operators can experience more time away from the Spanish-language work stations and perhaps eventually become supervisors, he said.

Several workers and officials said that anyone bothered by the attention paid to the need for bilingual operators should remember that they could benefit someday from a non-English speaker who calls 911 on their behalf.

“It may be a Spanish speaker calling about an accident involving an English speaker,” Alarcon said. “It may be a Spanish speaker calling about an officer who’s been shot.”

*

And while the most obvious need is for Spanish skills, it does not end there. Almost 2,000 calls in 1994 came from people who spoke neither English nor Spanish, many of them speaking Korean, Armenian, Japanese, Mandarin or Russian. Those calls were handled through conference calls with an A T & T interpreter service.

Elfmont said many of the changes in service could be made with about 175 new operators--at an annual cost of about $10 million.

Without more operators--16 more work consoles are expected to be available by January--there is no way the division can keep up with demand, he said.

Felix Rodriguez, a police service representative for almost eight years, said he is optimistic about the direction the department’s 911 service is headed, but he believes service remains a dangerous luck of the draw for callers who cannot speak English.

“It’s very dangerous. There’s no doubt about it,” said Rodriguez, 27. “If you only speak Spanish and your only source for help is 911 and you have to wait, then you wait. You have no other choice.”