Affirmative action for 911 dispatchers

As if being directly victimized by black and Hispanic crime isn’t enough, Americans are also dying due to incompetent 911 dispatchers. A 2009 Readers Digest article recounts several tragic stories where the result of such incompetence was death:

One afternoon in January 2008, Nathan Lee returned home from work to find his two little boys crammed into the same crib, crying. Their mother had left behind her cell phone and purse and disappeared. Within a couple of hours, police in her southwest Florida town had a pretty good idea of what had happened to Denise Amber Lee. She’d been spotted tied up with rope—had even managed to briefly call 911—while in the backseat of a car owned by a 36-year-old unemployed plumber named Michael King.

Around 6:30 that evening, a woman placed an urgent call to 911 reporting the precise location of King’s Camaro. It had pulled up alongside her car at a traffic light, and she could see someone crying out for help and banging on the back window. (She thought it was a child.) Just a few miles away, police were desperately searching for Denise with dogs and a helicopter.

But tragically, the 911 center never passed along the motorist’s report. One officer later told Denise’s father he was “sure” the Camaro had driven right by him, but no one had told him to watch out for it. The next time anyone saw Denise Lee was a few days later. She was lying naked in a shallow grave; she’d been sexually assaulted and shot. “There is no doubt in my mind that if the 911 call had been handled properly, she would still be here,” Nathan Lee says. “It will haunt me for the rest of my life.”

If there’s one thing we think we can count on, it’s that a frantic call to 911 will bring a swift and effective response. Government’s first priority, after all, is protecting its citizens. But a spate of recent cases reveal shocking flaws in our national emergency response system—at a cost measured in lives. It’s a system overstressed by boneheaded calls about everything from hangnails to poor restaurant service, weakened by state governments raiding its funds, and hobbled by the incompetence of a few bad apples.

“You roll the dice” when making a call for emergency help, admits Ronald Bonneau, who runs a 911 center 30 miles south of Chicago. “Frankly, there are centers out there where the operators are not very well trained.”

The article includes a link where readers can hear the audio recordings of those calls. Actually, you can’t hear the calls; what you get, when you click the links, is “We’re sorry, but the page you’re looking for can’t be found.”

The Readers Digest article brings up a serious problem – but does its best to hide the racial angle from its readers. Like all other government jobs, 911 dispatcher positions are held to strict affirmative action “goals”. In other words, non-whites get preference and blacks are probably very much overrepresented. I say “probably” because such statistics are hard to come by. It is well-known that blacks are greatly overrepresented in government jobs in general, and if you apply for a job as a dispatcher, you’re likely to find this at the bottom of the application:

Obviously, the Affirmative Action Officer is not looking for white males. His goal is to authorize as many “minorities” and females as possible. Hiring a black female kills two birds with one stone. Here’s one in action:

A Google image search for “emergency dispatcher” yields results that would have us believe that almost all dispatchers are white. The same is true of “airline pilot”. This is probably because companies and agencies want to project an image of safety and reliability where customers cannot choose their specific providers.

There is no way of knowing how many people have lost their lives due to affirmative action in 911 dispatcher hiring. One wonders how many of those victims were whites who were murdered by “people of color” while other “people of color” mishandled their call for help. “Diversity” truly is a weapon of mass destruction.

If you call 911 and get an ebonics speaker, you might consider hanging up and trying again. Better yet, carry a gun and don’t depend on 911 for your safety.