‘Dysfunctional’ Broward County emergency 911 system hasn’t lived up to promises

Long before a baby died and a house burned to the ground, 911 callers in Broward County faced dangerous delays.

But the proposed solution — a seamless, countywide emergency 911 system — still hasn’t lived up to the promises. More than 20 years in the making, the partnership between the county and participating cities churns with distrust and dysfunction, observers inside and outside the system say.

Callers frantically dial 911, and sometimes, no one answers because of dire understaffing, the South Florida Sun Sentinel revealed earlier this year. A serious communications delay that plagued responders to the Parkland school shooting hasn’t been fixed, nearly five years after the tragedy. Plans to send ambulances across city lines to rescue people quicker haven’t fully materialized, 20 years after voters approved it on the ballot. And the countywide system recently suffered its first defection, when Coconut Creek gave up and withdrew. Officials in four other cities — Pompano Beach, Margate, Pembroke Pines and Fort Lauderdale — also have entertained leaving. Plantation and Coral Springs never joined.

The animosity threatens the future of the system. Internal county emails obtained by the South Florida Sun Sentinel on Friday show that county commissioners could vote as soon as January to oust the Broward Sheriff’s Office from operating the emergency 911 system.

It “seems to be going in the wrong direction,” Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said on Nov. 16, during a scathing review of Broward County’s emergency 911 system at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Commission. Emergency 911 system problems hampered law enforcement responses to the mass shooting at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood Airport in 2017 and to the Parkland school shooting in 2018.

“It’s dysfunctional,” said MSD commission member Ryan Petty, whose daughter Alaina, 14, was murdered in the high school shooting. “It puts everybody’s lives at risk.”

Promises unfulfilled

Ryan Shrouder, a city commissioner in Cooper City, was in middle school in 2002, when Broward voters passed a ballot item supporting a countywide emergency 911 system, where the closest ambulance would come to the rescue, even if it was across city lines — a system known as “closest unit response.”

“I’m now a city commissioner with three children of my own,” he told the Sun Sentinel, “and Broward County still does not have an acceptable regionalized 911 system or closest unit response system.”

Back then, a caller to 911 might be just blocks away from the closest ambulance, but it wouldn’t be sent if it belonged to a different city. And cellphone calls to 911 frequently were misdirected, forcing callers to wait to be transferred to the correct dispatch center.

Fixing those issues and upgrading an aging and failing radio system were the goals.

“It was a no-brainer,” said Pembroke Park City Commissioner Angelo Castillo, who served on the county’s charter review board at the time. “It was about closest unit response, eliminating zones where radios weren’t working. ... Everyone knew the system we had made no sense.”

After years of study, the system launched in 2014. City-run call centers closed, and the new countywide system began operating out of three call centers — in Sunrise, Coconut Creek and Pembroke Pines. Broward County raised property taxes to pay for it.

Yet all these years later, the county still hasn’t completed the mission, with sometimes tragic consequences.

• Improvements to the first responder radio system won’t be complete until next year. Progress was made in most of the county, but controversy and bureaucracy delayed installation of a 16th and final communications tower. County spokesman Greg Meyer said “construction on the tower base, frame, and shelter is complete, but installation and implementation of the radio system will take a few months. We expect it to be fully operational later in 2023.”

• The seamless sending of ambulances and other rescue vehicles across city lines is still in progress. Fort Lauderdale was among six cities that have spent two years working on it — but officials there said it’s still flawed. In the last two months, 12 more cities joined. Meyer said additional cities are expected to join in the first quarter of 2023. That would still leave four cities out, but Meyer said the county hopes technological advancements one day will allow Coral Springs, Parkland, Coconut Creek and Plantation to participate.

• The vast majority of 911 calls no longer have to be transferred — one of the chief gains of the system. But the transfers couldn’t be eliminated entirely, because Coral Springs and Plantation refused to join.

In what is a widely panned arrangement, the 911 system is owned and paid for by Broward County government, but operated by the Broward Sheriff’s Office. Participating cities complain that the county is overly bureaucratic and slow to make improvements that would help police and fire responders get to victims quicker. There is no figurehead who can be held accountable.

“If everybody’s responsible, nobody’s responsible,” Gualtieri said.

Members of the MSD commission were so incensed with Broward County’s delays in fixing known 911 problems, Gualtieri threatened to subpoena county officials to answer for it. By unanimous vote, the MSD commission recommended the county turn the system over to Broward Sheriff Gregory Tony, so that one entity could be in charge — and accountable.

County commissioners refused.

“As a result of the dysfunction, discord, performance issues, and questionable management of the regional system it is in the process of regressing to a fragmented emergency communications system, which was the impetus to regionalize in the first place,” an MSD Commission report grimly concluded.

Sunrise Mayor Mike Ryan, who helped lead consolidation, said it would have been more successful by now were it not for the political turmoil. Still, he said, it’s improving.

“It wasn’t as successful as rapidly as it should have been,” Ryan said. “There’s been a huge amount of friction and opportunities that were lost to make improvements earlier. But this new [county] administration is moving with a lot more urgency and haste.”

In March, a new county administrator, Monica Cepero, took the helm, when longtime leader Bertha Henry retired.

Red flags

Problems with the system began almost immediately.

The city of Fort Lauderdale had one of the most notorious transitions in 2014, complaining that units raced to the wrong address, or to the correct address but in the wrong city.

Family and friends of a man who died at Mills Pond Park alleged emergency responders took at least 20 minutes to arrive, even though the fire station is located just outside the park.

And then came tragedy at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport. A gunman killed five travelers in January 2017 after he bought a one-way ticket from Anchorage to Fort Lauderdale, checking a bag with a handgun and bullets.

Radio breakdowns were so severe that police missed whole phrases as they pursued false reports of a second shooter. In one instance, a request to “confirm shots fired” was heard as a declaration: “shots fired.”

The false reports of gunshots fueled panic at the airport, causing thousands of travelers to race to the tarmac, where many were stranded for hours. In the initial mayhem and the later stampede, at least 53 people were taken to the hospital for heat stroke, chest pains, panic attacks, low blood sugar, trouble breathing and broken bones. Some had been trampled.

The same radios desperately failed Parkland on Valentine’s Day 2018.

A shooter walked into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, murdering 17 students and staff, and injuring more.

The response from law enforcement was hampered by the radios: Officers had trouble communicating because the radio system buckled under the crush of activity. Officers had to set out on bikes or on foot to hand-deliver messages and instructions.

“I couldn’t get on the radio myself several times,” Broward Sheriff Office Lt. Steven O’Neill told investigators at the time. " ... We simply couldn’t transmit on the radio or receive.”

Callers to 911 had to be transferred from Coral Springs to the countywide dispatch center — a problem that remains to this day, the MSD commission noted.

Coral Springs Police Chief Brad McKeone said Coral Springs wants to connect the two systems using a software “hub,” but after many meetings with Broward County officials, the connection hasn’t materialized.

“Every time we kind of get closer to that goal line,” he told the MSD commission in November, “the goal post gets moved a little bit further, and a little bit further.”

Turmoil today

After a baby was turning blue on New Year’s Day 2022, at least three callers dialed 911 and no one answered. So the desperate dad grabbed his 2-month-old child and made the 4-mile trip to Broward Health North.

His infant son, Keishawn Johnson Jr., died.

So far this year, the infant died, a house in Hollywood burned down, and a Hollywood man said his wife died after his calls to 911 went unanswered. They were among thousands of unanswered 911 calls, the Sun Sentinel reported in April.

And Broward Mayor Lamar Fisher said authorities were alerted to a situation in Hollywood on Dec. 17 where a woman said she called 911 three times and got no response. A man was having a medical emergency and needed urgent help. “It’s under investigation right now,” he said, to figure out “where the pitfall was.”

The county’s head of the system, Tracy Jackson, works for County Administrator Cepero. But county commissioners said they had no idea about dangerous understaffing and unanswered calls until they read about it in the Sun Sentinel. They acted quickly, voting in May to spend millions raising salaries for dispatchers and call-takers.

The Sheriff’s Office expects the centers to be fully staffed with 449 employees in the first quarter of 2023, according to Angela Mize, the sheriff’s assistant director of regional communications.

Mayor Ryan said he commends the County Commission for acting quickly based on the Sun Sentinel’s reporting, but he said it also exhibits the very problem many are complaining about. The county needs a public safety officer who reports directly to the County Commission, he said.

“You don’t have anybody who’s ever held accountable for shortcomings,” he said. " ... Instead, you have the fingerpointing.”

Some gains, some pains

On a Sunday afternoon, just two weeks ago, retired Sheriff’s Deputy Tony Serralles was watching NFL football at his Margate home when he heard a crash at a nearby shopping plaza on Royal Palm Boulevard. He could see from his window that an elderly woman had smashed her vehicle into a pole at the shopping plaza. He ran to the scene.

The woman was in pain, and couldn’t open her car door.

Serralles took a screenshot of his cellphone records, which show his first 911 call was made at 4:40 p.m. He listened to ringing for 50 seconds, then hung up, frustrated. He called back at 4:41 p.m. The phone rang and rang, for 26 seconds. He hung up again, looking up the number to call Margate police directly.

That’s when the 911 center called him back. He watched police drive past him, twice. A dispatcher told him they couldn’t find him.

He’d never called 911 as a civilian before.

“I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “Had she been severely injured or gone through the storefront, it was at least a 2-3 minute delay.”

A 2019 report of the MSD Commission revealed another embarrassing snafu in Margate. Police were doing surveillance of a Dollar Tree, watching for a serial armed robber. Sure enough, the criminal struck while police were across the street watching.

But police didn’t know, and the robber got away, because the store clerk’s 911 call wasn’t answered the first or second time she called. She kept calling, and hanging up, and trying again.

His frustration bubbling over, Margate Vice Mayor Tommy Ruzzano is mulling asking his commission next year to explore following the footsteps of Coconut Creek, abandoning the county and hiring Coral Springs.

“It’s horrible, we’ve had a lot of problems,” he said. “It’s all about the time. Time is the most important thing here. Time can mean the life or death of a person.”

Pompano Beach officials discussed leaving the system, as well.

“We’re looking at various scenarios but everything has a cost,” Pompano Beach Mayor Rex Hardin said earlier this year. He said the problems have been “gradually bubbling up. Like a boiling pot of water on a stove. It starts off cold water ... and gets hotter. And then it’s a raging boil.”

Leaders in the cities who refused to join said they don’t regret it.

“History has shown it was a good decision,” then-Mayor Diane Veltri Bendekovic told the Sun Sentinel last week, of Plantation’s refusal to join. “They just haven’t gotten it right.”

McKeone said he couldn’t join a system that didn’t prioritize speed. His city took over 911 call-answering and dispatching for Coconut Creek in November.

In just the first two weeks of handling calls for Coconut Creek, the call-processing time dropped from 4½ minutes under the county system, to 54 seconds with Coral Springs, Gualtieri said, citing a recent consultant’s report.

“If a child goes into a pool, and it’s a two-minute difference in somebody getting there, that’s the difference between life and death,” McKeone said at the November MSD Commission meeting. “At the end of the day, we can have a regional system, but if it’s a difference in response time of minutes, I can’t join that system.”

Sheriff’s Col. Oscar Llerena told the MSD Commission that call-takers recently abandoned a prescribed script of questions they were forced to ask callers, a time-intensive protocol Broward County required. Calls will be processed quicker now, they said.

Coconut Creek Commissioner Joshua Rydell said his city was excited to transition to using Coral Springs — where call-takers and dispatchers are familiar with his city. He blamed the regional system’s woes on having “two chefs in the kitchen” — the Sheriff’s Office and the county.

But the never-ending problems shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, he said.

“Everyone’s been on notice for years about this. It’s just sad. It’s sad for the residents. When you call 911 there’s an expectation you will be protected. And we’ve proven that’s not the case, in circumstances.”

Are we safer?

Ryan said it’s difficult to judge whether police and fire responders are getting to victims quicker now than when cities had their own systems, because there is no reliable baseline data for comparison. But progress has been made, he said, and there’s more transparency — and data — than before.

Broward’s Mayor Fisher said he can “say with certainty that the system has delivered tangible results.”

“We have achieved a great deal in the past 20 years since the Charter Amendment of 2002 mandated the creation of the System and we look forward to another twenty years of innovation and leadership in public safety,” he said in a written response to the Sun Sentinel.

He cited the elimination of most call transfers, and a “nearly completed” closest unit response system.

“The remaining area of concern is the critical staffing shortage which the Commission has already provided funds and [Broward Sheriff’s Office] has confirmed positive results from recruitment efforts,” he said.

In a statement from county administration, officials said they’re working on it daily.

“While we have achieved a great deal since the voters of Broward County approved the charter amendment in 2002,” they said, “we commit to constant improvement.”

Staff writer Brittany Wallman can be reached at bwallman@sunsentinel.com or 954-356-4541. Follow her on Twitter @BrittanyWallman