FORT WORTH, Texas — A Fort Worth mom's bad experience with an urgent 911 call has resulted in a city audit that shows her experience wasn't an isolated case, and that response times in Forth Worth are a lingering problem.
"She was unresponsive, not breathing," Jamie Haswell told us last June of the emergency involving her 2-year-old daughter. But her 911 call was never answered. She says she only got a recording. The result was the same when she ran outside screaming to neighbors for help.
"Nobody got a live person initially," she told us. "And to me, that's not acceptable."
RELATED: Fort Worth mom says neighbor drove her daughter to urgent care after 911 failed to answer call
Her very public complaints to us, and on social media, were the catalyst for an audit of Fort Worth police response times. The Department of Internal Audit's Police Response Time Audit Report, released December 30 by City Auditor Patrice Randle, showed that in June of 2021, 23% of 911 calls in Fort Worth were abandoned, indicating callers chose to hang up when they didn't get an answer. And the Fort Worth Police Department's goal of 8 minutes and 54 seconds as the target for an officer to arrive at a Priority 1 response call wasn't met 46.36% of the time in a 14-month period.
"And it really exposed a problem that your rank-and-file officers have known about for quite a while," said Manny Ramirez of the Fort Worth Police Officers Association. "This provides the wake-up call that's needed to tell our city leaders that we need more police officers."
In a written statement, the police department said that the contributing factors of "population growth, weather, current staffing, and traffic congestion" do play a role. "Some of the abandoned calls were caused by lack of personnel available to answer the calls. But we have since increased efforts and pay to retain employees and hire new staff to fill our vacant positions. We are starting to see positive changes as a result of those efforts."
As for Jamie Haswell, whose complaints started this audit and investigation, and whose daughter is "doing well," she told WFAA on Tuesday:
"I want them to know that I support the police, respect them, and am so thankful for each officer and dispatcher and their service to our community.
"I just hope and pray something as vital as the 911 system in place can be fixed as well as these response times. I hope getting the word out pushes our city toward positive changes."
City Auditor Randle also wrote that "we concluded that there were no written procedures or guidelines governing the reassessment, calculation and/or reporting of police response time."
The City and Fort Worth police agreed to a June 2022 deadline to solve that issue.
Read the audit in full below.