Officials Probe Bungled 911 Child Abuse Call

by Thomas MacMillan | Feb 22, 2011 9:28 pm
New Haven Independent

When a 911 call came in reporting child abuse in progress, the dispatcher seems to have made a crucial error that allowed the call slip through the cracks.

City spokesman Adam Joseph said Tuesday night that the Public Safety Department is looking into the 911 dispatch center’s handling of an emergency call from last Thursday, Feb. 17.

Here’s what he said happened:

A woman called to report that she had seen a child being beaten inside a moving car in New Haven. The dispatcher processed the call, but seems to have assigned the wrong code to it, so that police didn’t realize that the incident was still in progress.

When the woman did not get an immediate response to her call, she complained to police. Cops notified the Public Safety Department, who looked up the coding and realized there may have been an error.

The Public Safety Department, the civilian department that fields emergency calls, is investigating what went wrong, Joseph said.

“The employee will be retrained in that area and could face disciplinary action at the conclusion of the investigation,” he said.

The woman who reported the alleged abuse gave police a plate number for the car she saw, but it didn’t come up in the system, Joseph said.

http://newhavenindependent.org/index.php/archives/entry/officials_probe_bungled_911_child_abuse_call/

Seriously, this and the previous goofy story I just posted appear one after the other in my YAHOO News lookup tonight.