Murphy 911 and emergency services response times need to improve

by Bill Baumbach of of The Collin County Observer

Last month, there was renewed media interest in the sad death of a Murphy toddler. The child was strangled after being caught in a backyard soccer net in 2007.

After WFAA and the Dallas Morning News wrote articles critical of the Murphy 9-1-1 operator and the Murphy police, the City released a report (PDF) on the incident written by the then-acting city Manager.

The news media focused on an emotionally charged 9-1-1 call by the child's distraught mother leading to a 2-1/2 minute delay in summoning the EMTs.

It seemed to me that the six-minute police response and the eight-minute EMT response time after dispatch was unusually long for a city as small and compact as Murphy.

In order to try to obtain some basis for critiquing the emergency team's responses, I sent open record requests to both Murphy and the neighboring City of Wylie.

The results are sobering.

For the Murphy Police Department, the average response time (averaged over 15,530 calls in 2008) was almost 7 1/2 minutes. Most of that time - 4 1/2 minutes was spent before 9-1-1 actually issued a dispatch to the patrol officers.

However in Wylie, the average response time (averaged over 27,230 calls in 2008) was 4 3/4 minutes. The time 9-1-1 needed to dispatch averaged only about 1 minute.

The statistics for Fire/EMT response are just as disturbing.

In Murphy, the average response time for Fire/EMT was over 8 minutes. In neighboring Wylie, it was 4 1/4 minutes.

Benchmarks set by the National Fire Protection Association (Standard for the Organization and Deployment of Fire Suppression Operations, Emergency Medical Operations, and Special Operations to the Public by Career Fire Departments) call for a response time of 4 minutes or less, achieved 90% of the time.

Studies have proven that reduced response times save lives. One 10-year-old study showed that reducing the EMT arrival time from 8 minutes to 5 minutes almost doubled the survival rate of patients in cardiac arrest.

Another study, from 2005, showed that while 8 minute response times did not positively impact survival rates, moving to the 4 minute average did have a significant effect on overall patient survivability.

The Wylie fire department has an ISO 1 rating, which is the highest rating offered by the Insurance Services Office, who rates fire departments on a scale of 1 (best) to 10 (worst). Murphy's ISO rating is 4.

Looking a little deeper into the sub-par Murphy statistics, I discovered two things that far outweigh the smaller size of Murphy's public safety departments.

First, in 2006, Murphy made a decision to bring 9-1-1 operations "in-house" as part of the police department's communications division. In 2007 (at the time of Matthew Cantrell's death) the authorized staffing for police communications was 5 persons. That was increased to 8 in 2008, but decreased to 7 in the 2009 budget.

Second, according to those I've talked to, the City Council stopped receiving regular response time statistics from the city manager "a few years ago".

It would appear to this writer that the city's slow response times are the result of management neglect, poor implementation of the 9-1-1 system, and by lack of oversight by the elected city council.