A year after Foggy Bottom residents raised concerns to local leaders about 911 dispatch delays, the District has seen drastic improvement in call response time and accuracy following oversight into the program and reforms by Ward 2 Councilmember Brooke Pinto, a D.C. government dashboard shows.
As repeated 911 outages have struck the District since 2024, Pinto increased oversight on the Office of Unified Communications — which fields emergency and non-emergency 911 and 311 calls — by conducting unannounced visits to OUC’s 911 call center, hosting monthly public oversight hearings and introducing a bill last month aimed at boosting accuracy in dispatching services at the call center. Staffing and funding issues have plagued OUC for years, leading to dispatch mistakes and delays in response time, but recent agency data shows the call center is now in line with national standards, with average answer time falling from 6.5 seconds in February 2025 to 1.8 seconds in February 2026.
The OUC answered 96.3 percent of 911 calls within 15 seconds in February, up from about 88.2 percent last February, according to the dashboard. The dashboard also shows a smaller share of callers who abandoned their call after waiting more than 15 seconds, dropping from 4.7 percent to 3.1 percent from 2025 to 2026 — a 726-call decline from 2,282 in 2025.
A spokesperson for OUC said strategic investments in training and technology have pushed the office to exceed the national 911 standards of answering 95 percent of calls within 20 seconds. They said OUC answers 98 percent of 911 calls within four seconds, down from 15 seconds in 2024.
The daily share of 911 calls operators picked up within 15 seconds stayed above 90 percent throughout that 2026 window after dipping below 90 percent on 12 separate days in 2025, the dashboard shows.
The improvements come a year after residents of Claridge House Cooperative in Foggy Bottom raised concerns about 911 call wait times after more than 200 residents evacuated the building in February 2025 after a tenant spotted smoke in the elevator and a front desk agent dialed 911 — only to allegedly be put on hold for a half-hour.
D.C.’s 911 call center has struggled with staffing shortages since 2023, which the center’s director said contributed to the delays in services and accuracy at a Committee for the Judiciary and Public Safety meeting in September 2024. In January, 13 out of 66 — or about 19 percent of shifts — did not meet the agency’s minimum staffing target, according to the OUC dashboard.
The dashboard only contains staffing data for the three most recent months, but The Washington Post reported in July 2024 about 90 percent of shifts at the call center did not have enough staff that month. The issues mirror shortages at call centers across the United States that have been struggling to respond to emergencies with speed, efficiency and accuracy without national mandates for the industry for about the last five years, CNN reported in August.
At a Feb. 19 Committee on Judiciary and Public Safety oversight hearing for D.C. Fire and Emergency Medical Service and the Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement, public witness Marie Drissel testified that she is supportive of FEMS’ performance over the last year but is “remaining critical” of OUC because the office accidentally dispatched a first responder to an address earlier that month that didn’t exist to help an elderly patient who was having difficulty breathing.
“The firefighter had to call the victims home directly to find the correct location, which was an entirely different quadrant,” Drissel said. “This wasted extremely valuable time. D.C. Fire and EMS is doing their part, now the city must fix the Office of Unified Communication.”
Last month, Pinto introduced the Emergency Medical Services Clarification Amendment Act of 2026, requiring call takers and dispatchers to be certified in emergency medical dispatch by the OUC Medical Director within one year of hire. Co-introduced by Councilmembers Janeese Lewis George and Anita Bonds, the bill also designates the FEMS Medical Director as the Medical Director of the Office of Unified Communications to improve response speed and accuracy.
“While I am encouraged that there have been significant improvements in efficiency and speed at OUC, we must pass this legislation to further protect the public interest – any mistake or delay can have life-altering consequences,” Pinto said in a press release.
