Street duplication hangs up 911
State, providers urged to close dangerous gap in system
A delayed police response to a fatal stabbing in Dorchester last month has revealed an unintended consequence of competition in the telephone industry: If you live on a street with a common name, police and fire crews could be confused about where you live.
While more companies are offering Boston residents telephone service, they do not uniformly give the state-run 911 system neighborhood names along with the individual address of their customers, according to city and state officials.
Some Boston leaders are calling this a gap in a key emergency system that needs to be plugged as the number of providers grows. They are calling on the state to require that all companies providing phone service submit to the state's 911 database a neighborhood name along with each customer's address.
The gaps came to light following an incident on Washington Street in Dorchester last month, when police went to an identical address in downtown Boston.
As a result, police did not arrive at the correct location until 14 minutes after the call.
"A system that does not discern the section of the city that a call is coming from is a system that endangers the public," said Councilor Charles Yancey, who represents the Dorchester neighborhood where the 911 call was made. Yancey has called for a City Council hearing to discuss the issue in public. "That system has to change," he said.
Officials said
Yancey said the woman who called 911 in the Dorchester stabbing told him she has
Spokesmen for Comcast,
"This was an isolated incident that we rectified immediately after learning about it," said Comcast spokesman Jim Hughes. "We take 911 very seriously."
The dispatcher who took the call in the March 9 incident, relying on the location that appeared in a computer mapping system, sent cruisers to a Washington Street address in Downtown Crossing, not Dorchester, where the stabbing happened. Authorities said they believe the victim, Melissa Santiago, had been dead for hours before emergency responders arrived, but officials acknowledged the situation pointed to a potentially serious gap in the 911 database for a city in which nearly 200 Boston street names appear more than once.
"As more phone companies come online, they need to understand their responsibility to their customers to provide accurate data so that emergency responders can get to the appropriate address," said Dot Joyce, a spokeswoman for Mayor Thomas M. Menino.
The state will consider ways to fix the problem, said Terrell Harris, spokesman for the state executive office of public safety, which runs the 911 system. "We realize that this is an issue that has to be addressed, and we have to come up with some way to solve this problem," Harris said. "We are looking at any and everything we can and we're going to find a solution."
Harris called it "not feasible" to cull the entire database for duplicated addresses.
"It is true that, at least in the case of Verizon, they are neighborhood-specific, and they can be with others." Harris said. "It appears this Washington Street fiasco was a mistake, but the problem is we don't know how many of those mistakes there are."
It is not clear how widespread the problem is in the 911 database. Deputy Superintendent John Daley of the Boston Police Department said that in spot checks of the database, officials have identified other Boston addresses without neighborhoods included which exist in more than one neighborhood. He said police contact the phone company in each case to have them specify the address's neighborhood in the database.
"We take note of them on a case-by-case basis," he said.
Boston police Commissioner Edward F. Davis announced a new protocol for handling 911 calls in the aftermath of last month's mix-up. He said when 911 receives a report of a serious incident at an address with multiple locations in the city, police will immediately respond to each possible location. Davis said the policy would remain in place until the 911 system could be fixed to ensure dispatchers see the right addresses on their computer screens.
Davis said previously and Harris said yesterday that dispatchers also are receiving additional training to require that they ask callers specifically about the neighborhood in which an incident occurred.
Yancey said he is concerned the city's approach could still cost emergency responders precious time and said he's concerned about the strain it could place on police resources.
"I realize it's a stop-gap measure, but with today's technology, you would think we could run a more efficient operation."
John C. Drake can be reached at jdrake@globe.com. 