On July 4, 2023, Caitlin Ditta had just finished hosting a barbecue with her husband and baby daughter when she felt a strange sensation. Ditta, a 33-year-old school therapist living in Oakland, California, had suffered a hemorrhage after giving birth in the hospital a few weeks earlier. She recovered quickly, but the doctors issued a stark warning: If the bleeding started again, she should seek help immediately. Delaying care could be fatal.
Now, breastfeeding her baby on the living room couch, Ditta felt what she describes as “a rush of something coming out of me.” She hustled to the bathroom, wishing against her own certainty: Please don’t be blood. Please don’t be blood.
It was blood—“a murder scene” of it, she says.
She immediately called 911 and told her husband to do the same. But as they dialed and redialed one of the best-known telephone numbers in America, no one picked up. Ditta recalls holding both phones in her hands, panic and disorientation washing over her. Time seemed to be slowing down. She felt certain she would die.
“ It felt like every second counted, because there was blood pouring out of me,” she says. “I was like, ‘Where are the people who are supposed to pick up?’ Like, where are they!?’”
Her emergency came at a particularly troubled time for Oakland’s dispatch center. For years, a slew of city audits and grand jury reports had highlighted the same tangle of problems: There were simply not enough 911 dispatchers to keep up with the volume of calls coming in. Workers faced grueling conditions and mandatory overtime, and the hiring process was chronically slow. In 2023, more than 123,000 callers—40 percent of the year’s total—waited at least 40 seconds to connect during their emergencies. A few weeks after Ditta’s call, the state issued an ultimatum to Oakland: Answer the vast majority of 911 calls within 15 seconds or risk losing funding.
For emergency callers like Ditta, the stakes of delayed 911 pickups can be life or death. Studies have shown that administering CPR immediately after a cardiac arrest can double or triple a victim’s chances of surviving. And in an era of endless mass shootings, prompt bleeding triage is more essential than ever.
“The national average EMS response time is roughly seven to ten minutes,” explains Pat O’Neill of Stop the Bleed, a Department of Defense program designed to train the public in emergency care. “In many of the most severe cases, no emergency system, however well-staffed, can place a professional responder on scene before the survival window closes.” Dispatchers, who are often trained in emergency procedures, can help in seconds—as long as they’re available to pick up the phone.
Ditta had never given much thought to the inner workings of America’s 911 system. Like many people, her understanding of the service was rudimentary: Call the number, get immediate help. The hemorrhage, and what happened after it, shocked her out of those preconceptions.
“What if I had been alone?” she says. “And what if I had bled so much that I passed out? When would they have picked up?”
In the American imagination, 911 is a simple service with a straightforward purpose. But on the other end of the line, a complex machine is operating, often beyond its capacity. There are approximately 6,000 dispatch centers across the country. Some are tucked into rural areas and employ just a handful of telecommunicators. Others function as urban command centers, with dozens of employees answering millions of calls each year. The service is funded in large part by fees attached to individuals’ and businesses’ phone bills. But as tech upgrades have rolled out in recent years, the cost of 911 has outpaced fee revenue, leaving municipalities increasingly on the hook to make up the difference. All the while, call volumes have increased.
“The 911 system is a part of our core civic infrastructure,” says Rebecca Neusteter, Executive Director of the University of Chicago Health Lab and a leading 911 researcher. That—and the fact that it’s largely funded by direct consumer charges—carry “an expectation that people are going to be able to access the care that they needed.”
Although there is no federal agency overseeing the performance of 911 centers, one standard holds firm nationwide: “call answer times”—the speed at which telecommunicators are expected to pick up the phone. In 2020, a professional organization called the National Emergency Number Association (NENA) established the current benchmark: Dispatch centers should pick up 90 percent of calls in 15 seconds or less. (It also calls for 95 percent of calls to be answered within 20 seconds).
In a fragmented and decentralized system, the NENA standard is perhaps the clearest indicator of 911’s efficacy. Yet dozens of major cities have fallen short of it for years, causing catastrophic delays for the public and raising serious questions about the reliability of America’s emergency infrastructure.
In early 2026, I submitted records requests seeking five years’ worth of answer time data from more than 100 dispatch centers in and around America’s largest cities. Of the 68 that have so far provided records, nearly half failed to meet the NENA standard last year. The Los Angeles Police Department’s Metropolitan Dispatch Center, for example, picked up only 64 percent of its 2.9 million 911 calls within 15 seconds in 2025; more than 500,000 callers waited at least 40 seconds, according to state data. In Kansas City, Missouri, records show that police telecommunicators answered just 56 percent of 911 calls within 15 seconds last year. Its department left more than 100,000 people waiting a minute or longer on hold—278 callers per day, on average.
A limited tally of 911 calls placed on hold paints a picture of a system in the throes of its own emergency.
The overall scale of this issue is difficult to comprehend and nearly impossible to measure. But a limited tally of 911 calls placed on hold paints a picture of a system in the throes of its own emergency. More than 1.3 million callers across 18 cities waited for at least 40 seconds before reaching a telecommunicator in 2025. The true count is undoubtedly much higher, since many cities haven’t yet provided a tally—and since others don’t even track that information.
The crisis is bicoastal and slices across socioeconomic strata: Dispatch centers in cities like Phoenix, Arizona; Portland, Oregon; Las Vegas, Nevada; and Atlanta, Georgia all flunked the test in 2025. So did those in Indianapolis, Indiana; El Paso, Texas; and Virginia Beach, Virginia.
Some cities, like Austin, Texas, have been able to improve their performance dramatically in the face of public pressure. In others, though, the problems have dragged on.
On Jan. 27, 2023, a Missouri National Guard Sergeant named Richard Schlesing left work and texted his wife, Ashley. While driving down a two-lane road near the city’s downtown area, he accidentally shot himself in the leg with his Glock handgun. He pulled over, attempted to administer first aid, and dialed 911. The call never reached a dispatcher.
Roughly an hour later, Ashley Schlesing grew worried and began driving along her husband’s usual route home. She found him unresponsive in his car, blood covering the seat and floor. She called 911—also unsuccessfully—and began trying to flag down passersby. Finally, a man named Luke Springer stopped and began performing CPR on Schlesing. Springer’s 911 call went through, but it was far too late. In security camera footage of Schlesing’s accident, later acquired by police, he appeared to go motionless two minutes after firing his gun.
Ashley Schlesing filed a wrongful death suit a few months after her husband’s death, accusing St. Louis officials of failing to fix “a malfunctioning, understaffed and inept 911 system” and alleging “deficiencies including, but not limited to, long hold times, unanswered calls, and gross understaffing.” Although the city has improved its answer times since, it still fell well short of the 15-second standard in 2025. More than 43,200 callers waited at least 40 seconds for an answer last year—nearly 120 per day.
The St. Louis Metro Police Department declined to comment on its answer time data, or on the lawsuit, which is ongoing.
Crises like Schlesing’s play out routinely across the country. In Georgia, when a stray bullet ripped through Brittany McElrathbey’s neck and face in January 2024, several people tried unsuccessfully to connect to 911. Her brother Cornelius finally decided to haul her into a car and speed toward the hospital.
“It was like something out of the movies,” he told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “I wasn’t really trying to break the law, but the law didn’t matter at the time. We tried to get the law on the phone.”
“These workers are never seen. They’re never even heard. They are most of the time four floors underground in a dark, cold room.”
Oakland was in its sixth straight year of failing the NENA standard when Caitlin Ditta placed her call in 2023. That year, its telecommunicators were able to answer only 42 percent of emergency calls within 15 seconds, and the number of abandoned calls climbed past 74,000. In more than a dozen interviews, Oaklanders described waiting on hold during robberies and fires and after car accidents. One person said they’d been unable to reach dispatchers after watching someone throw a Molotov cocktail at a children’s center. Another said she couldn’t get through after seeing someone in a wheelchair weaving in and out of highway traffic.
The issue permeates everyday life, says Janani Ramachandran, a City Council member who has worked to reform Oakland’s system.
”I have people coming up to me—they’re like, ‘Oh wait, you’re a City Council member, right?’” she says. “‘Can you do something about the 911 system?’ And this might be at a party at 10 o’clock on a Friday night.”
There is no single cause for the lapse in America’s 911 answer speeds. But a key factor, according to experts, academics and telecommunicators themselves, is chronic understaffing. Between 2019 and 2022, the average vacancy rate in US 911 centers was around 25 percent, according to a 2023 report from two industry groups. Another study, published in 2025, surveyed nearly 1,400 911 professionals and found that 74 percent of them worked in centers that were struggling to fill vacant positions. In many areas, staffing dipped to perilously low levels in the years following the pandemic and has been on an uphill climb ever since.
Part of the problem is pay. Although 911 telecommunicators can earn more than $100,000 per year in some cities (including Oakland), government data show they often make significantly less than police officers and firefighters. A dispatcher’s average salary is just over $56,000 per year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Police make nearly $80,000.
Another factor is systemic underfunding. Each year, the Federal Communications Commission produces a report that tallies the overall cost of maintaining 911 in America. Recently, the agency added a section specifically seeking information about financial shortfalls. The responses carry an urgency familiar to anyone who’s answered a 911 call.
“911 fee revenues have never been sufficient to cover the full cost of 911 service,” wrote one respondent from North Dakota in the latest report. “As the cost of technology and human resources increases[,] the surcharge fees and percentages do not increase commensurate with those additional expenses. This means that local governments must dig deeper into their general funds each year to support 911 services.” Another respondent from Nevada wrote that underfunding had produced challenges in “maintaining or upgrading essential equipment” and “supporting staffing levels.”
Meanwhile, mountains of academic research have drawn a clear line between the grueling work of 911 telecommunicators and pervasive mental health problems. Dispatchers suffer from higher rates of anxiety, depression, PSTD and suicidal ideation than police or firefighters, according to one recent government study. Nonstop traumatic calls, combined with long hours and what researchers have called “a culture of resilience and underreporting,” can produce a doom loop of attrition.
“If you’re understaffed, you start the day in the hole,” explains Ty Wooten, Director of Government Affairs for the International Academies of Emergency Dispatch. “When you get understaffed, that creates overtime issues, which leads to people being burnt out. Which leads to more people leaving, which creates this hellacious circle of just not being able to move the needle.”
For years, the federal government has classified 911 telecommunicators as “office and administrative support occupations”—a category they share with customer service representatives, bank tellers and bill collectors. They are not part of the “protective service occupation” category, alongside police officers and firefighters, because the government has claimed that “most dispatchers are precluded from administering actual care, ‘talking’ someone through procedures, or providing advice.”
In reality, telecommunicators save lives on a regular basis. They assist callers with the administration of CPR roughly 320,000 times per year, according to one industry estimate. They coach callers through childbirth and stroke care. And, in many cases, they show their work: One dispatch center in Dane County, Wisconsin, maintains a “Wall of Life” with glass plaques commemorating each time a telecommunicator provided lifesaving care. Since 2020, they’ve racked up more than 120 saves. Many other centers across the US keep similar tallies.
“People think, ‘Oh, they just answer the phone. How hard could it be?’”
“A lot of people think, ‘Oh, they just answer the phone. How hard could it be?’” Wooten says, but “911 call takers and dispatchers have to be subject matter experts in everything. We have to know criminal law. We have to know civil law. We have to be social workers. … We have to know everything, because when people call 911, they don’t care that you work for a service that only does one of those things.”
Since 2019, dispatchers have pushed for federal legislation that would reclassify their work, placing them in the same labor category with other first responders. This change could help unlock new benefits and support, including earlier retirement, more comprehensive training and improved mental health care. Although each reclassification bill has garnered bipartisan support, none have ever been signed into law.
That may soon change. Last year, a reclassification bill, the “Enhancing First Response Act,” passed the Senate for the first time ever. One of its key architects, Rep. Norma Torres (D-Calif.), spent nearly 20 years as a dispatcher before joining Congress. She often describes a call that stuck with her: A young girl who’d been on hold for 20 minutes waiting for a Spanish-speaking dispatcher before Torres could answer was shot and killed by her uncle.
The call “ tore at me,” Torres says. “ The consequence for me has been carrying this responsibility of ensuring that no one else would ever die because we were not responsive.”
The Enhancing First Response Act landed in Congress last September and has been sitting there since. It entails no additional spending—although it could create trickle-down costs for states and cities—and it has yet to attract any opposition. Meanwhile, advocates say the costs would be minimal and the recognition long overdue.
“These workers are never seen,” Torres says. They’re never even heard. They are most of the time four floors underground in a dark, cold room. They never complain. They go there, they put in their eight, 10, or 12 hours, they go home. And that is how they live.”
In early July, Torres and Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Fla.) sent a letter to Speaker Mike Johnson, urging him to take up the Enhancing First Response Act on the House floor. That hasn’t happened yet, and Johnson’s office did not respond to a list of detailed questions about the bill’s status.
After Caitlin Ditta and her husband finally connected to Oakland’s 911 center, a team of firefighters arrived quickly. They stayed with her, offering reassurances, until an ambulance whisked her to the hospital.
There, she was given anesthesia and underwent an emergency surgery to stop the bleeding, during which she hemorrhaged again. When she awoke, doctors told her she had come very close to needing a hysterectomy; she would need a blood transfusion. Once she was stable, Ditta was transferred back to a delivery bed to feed her baby daughter.
“ I got lucky with my situation that it wasn’t actually life or death,” she says. “ But I’m like, What if someone has a heart attack?” She thinks “all the time,” she says, about people who weren’t as lucky.
Thanks in part to changes in hiring and recruitment, Oakland has improved its performance significantly: The city’s average answer time, which was 55 seconds the year Ditta called, dipped below 20 seconds last year. But it’s still well short of the NENA standard: In 2025, telecommunicators picked up 71 percent of calls within 15 seconds. The center remained understaffed and reliant on overtime into 2026.
Ditta’s daughter recently turned three. She and her husband are trying for another child. But it’s hard to forget the trauma associated with her hemorrhage—the blood, the panic, the surgery—or what happened when they sought help. They called the number they’d always been taught to rely on in situations like theirs, the number millions of Americans know by heart—and no one picked up.
“ It just illuminates a glaring difference in where you live, the care that you’ll get or response you will get from 911,” Ditta says. “Which sucks, because I like where I live, and I want to feel safe in the city where I live, and I want my kid to feel safe.”
This article was produced in partnership with Type Investigations.
Byard Duncan is continuing to report on America’s 911 system. Reach him at byardd@gmail.com, on social media @byardduncan, or on Signal at ByardDuncan.35 with experiences or tips.