It might be responsible for emergency services in Washington, but the District of Columbia's 911 call center remains a complete joke. Just not a very funny one. The Office of Unified Communications has been notoriously defective for years. But Mayor Muriel Bowser doesn't simply not care — she remains devoted to hiding her key leadership failure from the public.
The OUC remains beholden to the mayor’s policy of secrecy and deflection over its failure. The evidence for this enduring failure remains both anecdotal and statistical.
After suffering a daylight robbery just next to the FBI building last Sunday, for example, a victim told WUSA9 that "several witnesses called 911: One was hung up on and another was on hold for several minutes. Emergency crews and police eventually got to the scene ... an hour later." While the police have arrested and charged a 15-year-old girl for that robbery and others, their response time reflects another Washington problem: unacceptably slow police responses after dispatch notices.
Speak to the vast majority of Washington residents, and you'll find they have either experienced a similar delay in getting connected to 911 or know someone who has. You might also hear a litany of stories on how OUC dispatchers send emergency responders to the wrong location. I have seen these problems up close. Attending to a dying man who had just been shot on my street back in 2019, for example, I couldn't even get through to 911. Fortunately, police officers nearby heard the shots and arrived.
A glimmer of accountability is, however, breaking through Bowser's wall of secrecy. The Council of the District of Columbia has now forced the OUC to post its performance data online. But even here, attempts at deception reign.
On its performance page , the OUC notes that the National Emergency Number Association says that 90% of 911 calls should be answered in 15 seconds or less. OUC highlights its claim that Washington's average 911 call answer time in 2023 was 12.03 seconds. However, after scrolling through a litany of social media-friendly graphics, including "anatomy of a 911 call," we find the data for 2024. The data show that between May 1 and July 15, the latest data, the OUC only met or exceeded the 90% target on three days: July 8, May 23, and May 27.
Three days.
What went wrong here? Bowser.
In January 2021, Cleo Subido replaced Karima Holmes, whose leadership at OUC was a multiyear masterpiece of incompetence. But as ABC 7 News reported in March, Subido was blacklisted and eventually pushed out when she attempted to fix things by targeting staff collecting pay and benefits but never turning up to work and enabling an audit to take place, for example. Subido faced heavy pressure from the mayor's office to stop her reform efforts. As she explained, "It was very clear to me that the mayor was leading all of this."
You'll never guess who Bowser then replaced Subido with: Holmes.
Unsurprisingly, Holmes failed again. But before she was finally forced out under D.C. Council pressure in December 2022, Holmes claimed, "Under no uncertain terms and despite claims to the contrary, D.C. 911 is not in a crisis." Unsurprisingly, considering her tolerance for disappearing employees and nonexistent professional standards, Holmes was heavily supported by the OUC’s union.
Bowser was also furious that her crony had to go. Announcing Holmes's departure, Bowser absurdly insisted that she "was the right leader at the right time for OUC." The mayor added that Holmes was a "nationally recognized 911 expert" and that "under Director Holmes’s leadership, OUC consistently offered compassion and expertise when handling [911 calls]."
The avoidable dead were unavailable to comment on the mayor's claim. And yet this story of government incompetence gets even more ridiculous.
In a striking example of the government's tendency to reward failure, Holmes is now the Washington branch chief for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. I'm not joking. The person most responsible for the D.C. 911 call center’s failures, failures that led to loss of life and catastrophic outcomes for too many Washington residents, now has a leading role in the federal government’s cybersecurity apparatus. Let’s just hope the Russian SVR and Chinese MSS intelligence services don’t notice.
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The mayor’s disdain for accountability remains nearly as impressive as the OUC’s actual failings. Consider ABC 7 News’s note that "repeated requests to the mayor's office for an interview for this story were ignored."
With Washington's income tax rate now at 8.5%, it's no wonder that so many D.C. residents are leaving for Virginia.
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