Shortage of 911 Staff Who
Speak Foreign Tongues

By JOHN MARZULLI
Daily News Police Bureau Chief

aced with a shortage of operators who speak foreign languages, the number of 911 calls the NYPD must transfer to an out-of-state translation service has jumped 21%, officials said yesterday.

For the first six months of the 2001 fiscal year, 55,623 calls were patched to interpreters throughout the country, compared with 45,897 during the same period in 2000, said NYPD Deputy Commissioner Ari Wax.

The bulk of the transferred calls were from Spanish-speaking callers. The NYPD has 17 Spanish-speaking 911 operators out of 1,222, Wax said.

Critics say calls transferred out of state take longer to handle than in-house calls — four minutes vs. two minutes — and that in an emergency, every second counts.

"The Spanish-speaking citizens of this city deserve qualified, trained operators who know the city and who are not based in Utah or some other state," said Chris Policano, a spokesman for District Council 37, whose union includes 911 operators.

But Wax said the 17 operators are not the only bilingual 911 staffers — but they are the only ones willing to take calls from Spanish speakers.

The operators' union discourages them from taking foreign language calls unless the city will pay them extra, Wax said. Policano denied that charge.

Foreign-language calls that the NYPD can't handle are transferred to Monterey, Calif.-based Language Line Services. Cantonese- and Mandarin-speaking 911 callers make up the next-largest group who are transferred to the company, which has interpreters throughout the country who can speak more than 72 dialects.

The NYPD pays Language Line $2.35 per minute for its services. The cost is expected to hit $1.1 million for the current fiscal year, compared with $760,000 in fiscal year 2000.

"If you cannot hire sufficient number of people with the requisite skills ... [the language line] is the best alternative," Wax said.

The volume of 911 calls has been rising dramatically — even as the crime rate drops — largely because of the proliferation of cellular phones.

This year, the NYPD projects it will log 12.7 million 911 calls, a 10% increase over 2000, Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik told a City Council committee yesterday.

Original Publication Date: 5/1/01

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