After a meeting of the Hialeah city council, no decision was made on the situation with calls to 911. Councilman Bryan Calvo was firm in his argument that there is a problem. However, most council members said there is not a crisis but rather a lack of staff, something the city is trying to fix with ads to recruit new emergency operators.
Heidi Mendoza says that she never imagined having that experience with the 911 emergency service in Hialeah when months ago they tried to rob her right outside her home in the area of East 5th Street and Ninth Avenue in the city.
The resident who experienced delays when calling 911, recounts: “they wanted to rob my truck, I called several times, my cell phone rang, rang and rang and they didn’t answer me. It was like 11 in the morning,” Mendoza says.
A situation that other residents have also reported and that Councilor Bryan Calvo brought to the table for debate this Tuesday at the council meeting asking for an investigation. “They did not allow them to continue asking the questions that had to be asked … I have requested a series of documents, information, what is happening with 911 and I have been denied,” Calvo said.
Lieutenant Eddie Rodríguez, spokesman for the Hialeah Police Department explains that there is no crisis, “what we are is that like any other police department not only here in Florida but around the nation … it is very difficult to recruit new people.”
According to records from the Hialeah fire department, this 2023 they have received 78,562 calls to 911, only about 5,307 of them were abandoned.
Carl Zogby, councilman of the city of Hialeah explains that “abandoned is that they were not answered in a quick time but all those calls are recorded and you have to return that call and say you called what is the problem.”
The truth is that the majority of councilors today recognized that if there is a problem due to the lack of personnel in this emergency department that the city says is already looking for a solution.
“At that moment we have 44 people … many of them are people we hired to be able to provide this type of service”, warns the mayor of Hialeah, Esteban Bovo.
Hialeah City Councilman Carl Zogby notes, “We’ve gone up, we’ve passed a pay raise to bring in more people and recruit.”
“We are also recruiting from the police… we have notices, we have things on the buses,” added Eddie Rodríguez, spokesman for the Hialeah police department.
Councilman Calvo requested all call records from the city to continue his investigation, as Hialeah continues to search for operators for the hotline.
BEGINNING OF THE CONTROVERSY
It all started after Councilman Bryan Calvo called for an immediate investigation into the 911 service in Hialeah, following the publication of a report revealing figures on calls that were allegedly lost or abandoned, which was dismissed by the city’s mayor, Esteban Bovo, who points out that the service operates optimally.
Councilman Calvo points out that a local media article, along with corroborated data from Miami-Dade County, exposes “that since 2021, more than 32,000 emergency calls made to the city’s 911 operators have been lost or abandoned, endangering the lives and safety of our citizens.”
According to what was published by El Nuevo Herald, on average, each day the Hialeah Emergency Department failed to answer 31 calls. As early as April, alleged problems with the city’s 911 service had been reported after a Hialeah city employee publicly pleaded for help over an alleged staff shortage.
Commissioner Bryan Calvo requests that an investigation be carried out, based on a March 2022 report made by the Jorge Colina group and other testimonies from residents, if there is a dangerous shortage of personnel, which translates into a slow or non-existent response to the emergency calls.
“911 is seriously neglected and needs immediate attention… the 911 dispatch unit is very understaffed, budgeted for 21 people, but employs 6,” said Councilman Bryan Calvo, who said, “I visited the department from 911 I was able to talk to the employees and supervisors and I saw the empty seats, there were only 3 people answering calls”.
The president of the firefighters union assures that months ago he experienced a long delay in an emergency call that he made to 911. “It was a call that I made to help another person, I dialed 13 to 14 times, they did not respond and in the end they transferred me to the Miami-Dade County”, says Eric Johnson, who remarks: “this is not the fault of the current administration, nor the mayor, nor the police chief, it comes from the past administration who knew about this problem and did not correct it”.
The mayor of the city, Esteban Bovo, who had already said in April through a statement that there was no crisis in that division, sent a statement on Monday dismissing the data from the report on 911 and offered some figures on the service.
“I want to take this opportunity to reassure the residents of the City of Hialeah that our 911 call center is operating optimally to respond to any emergency calls that come in,” Bovo said.
According to the mayor, in 2022 “the city of Hialeah, “abandoned” 7,849 calls out of a total of 140,161 calls received, or 5.6% of calls received. So far in 2023, Miami-Dade County has “abandoned” 68,127 calls out of a total of 632,222 calls received, or 9.73% of calls received. By comparison, the City of Hialeah has “dropped” 5,307 calls out of a total of 73,255 calls received, or 6.76% of calls received,” he said.
Bovo explains that in early April, his administration offered the city’s 911 operators “the most significant pay increase in 20 years. As a result, we have received several applicants for 911 operator jobs to date, and we look forward to more.” In the next weeks”.
The mayor criticized the publication and Calvo’s statements. “It is a breach of public trust and reckless,” he said. He thanked the 911 operators from the city of Hialeah, “Commander Jorge Llanes, and Police Chief George Fuente, for his great work.”
