Rini Sampath: Welcome back to Capital Commonsense. I’m Rini Sampath. When I ran for mayor, I talked a lot about William Ostertag, a member of my community whose case brought home the failures of DC 911. I learned about Dave Statter’s work through X, and today I get to hear directly from him about his reporting and advocacy.
I want more Washingtonians to pay attention, because any one of us could need this system. Dave, you’ve worked as a television reporter, a firefighter and a dispatcher. Thank you for your incredible service, and thank you so much for joining me today.
Dave Statter: It’s a pleasure to be here.
Rini Sampath: Before we get into your background, I want to put the question to you in one or two sentences. Why should everyone in Washington care about what’s happening with DC 911?
Dave Statter: I don’t think it’s just everyone in Washington, but in the region. I contend that, because of its call volume, OUC is the local public safety agency in the region with the most impact on our health and well-being. 911 is where all of it starts. If they screw up when they’re handling a crime report or an EMS or fire call, police, fire and EMS can’t do their jobs properly.
How 911 became Dave’s focus
Rini Sampath: Can you tell us how this became such a focus for you? Was there a moment when you thought, “I need to keep following this”?
Dave Statter: The background goes back half a century, when 911 was very different. I was a volunteer firefighter in Prince George’s County, one of their first cardiac rescue technicians. I was also a dispatcher for PG Fire for about three and a half to four years, and I learned a lot. But there were two things we didn’t have back then, so you had to know a lot more. We also didn’t have cell phones, so the volume of calls was a lot lower. It certainly informed my whole career.
I started covering 911 in the DC area well before there was an OUC, back in 1982, when I started at WTOP Radio. A little less than four years later, I started a 25-year career at Channel 9, WUSA, and reported on 911 there. When I retired, I didn’t think I’d go back to reporting. But about six years ago, I started hearing about problems that weren’t being solved, from sources and on the radio myself. I tried to pitch these stories to my former colleagues, couldn’t get them interested, and just started writing them myself.
Before OUC
Rini Sampath: Let’s talk about how we got this system. Take us through how DC handled emergency calls before OUC, and what creating OUC promised to fix.
Dave Statter: DC isn’t all that different from a lot of places. It started with police and fire doing things themselves. For the longest time, the police department had the 911 call takers and did its own dispatching, and fire did the same for fire and EMS. They did that for many, many years, and I covered it.
If you look at the history, both news reporting and an inspector general’s report helped pave the way for 911 reform and the creation of OUC, because there were problems in the old system. There are just a lot more problems now. I’m probably the reporter who did most of the stories they were talking about. Pat Collins, a veteran reporter, Jack Cloherty and people at The Washington Post did their share too.
There were some big problems in the old system. I remember one that was outrageous. In the late 1980s, a young man called about his dying dad in Fort Totten. He was crying because his dad was dying, and the person answering the call told him to grow up.
Rini Sampath: Grow up.
Dave Statter: The city administrator at the time, Tom Downs, actually went out there and apologized to the family, publicly and privately. He said this shouldn’t happen. That was one of the stories I broke back then. I wish that today they would at least treat the victims of 911 mistakes the same way: be direct with them, tell them what went wrong and apologize. They don’t do that these days.
The biggest problems today
Rini Sampath: I’ve formed my own views from researching the DC 911 system, driven by William Ostertag’s story. He was a friend of one of my best friends, Eric, [unclear]. What are the biggest problems with DC 911 today? You’ve followed this across different directors and years of promised changes. What’s your diagnosis, and which problems are most pressing?
Dave Statter: First, you have to understand that all 911 centers make mistakes. There are humans involved. But most of them learn from their mistakes, or at least try to. At DC 911, the same mistakes are made over and over.
The agency has been plagued by inadequate leadership, and for the past 12 years by a mayor who seems interested only in maintaining the status quo. More specifically, the agency is hurt tremendously by a lack of transparency and accountability. There’s also poor training, bad procedures and inadequate supervision.
Rini Sampath: So what’s standing in the way of reform under the Bowser administration? They know there are problems. Hardworking journalists like you have unearthed a lot of this, and the auditor has made many recommendations. What’s stopping Bowser from making these reforms?
Dave Statter: I don’t say this lightly. It took me three or four years to reach this conclusion, and I came to it about three or four years ago: there’s only one person to blame for the mess at 911, and that’s Muriel Bowser.
This is the bizarre thing about her. She’s the same person I praise immensely for her reform of EMS in DC. But she has turned a blind eye to OUC. She’s fought any reform for 12 years, and she continues to fight it. Mayor Bowser has never said a bad word publicly about OUC or DC 911. She’s never even acknowledged there was an audit. Her reaction to the audit, if you remember, was to bring back the director the audit was about.
Rini Sampath: Right.
Dave Statter: To be fair, OUC was a troubled agency when she took over 12 years ago. But it’s a lot worse now, and she only has herself to blame.
Heather McGaffin’s tenure
Rini Sampath: Let’s talk about the director who is now leaving for the City of Alexandria. For our listeners, we’re talking about the director of the Office of Unified Communications, Heather McGaffin. I publicly called for her to be fired. What are your biggest criticisms of her and how she ran the agency?
Dave Statter: Just to be clear, the director I said was brought back wasn’t Heather. It was Karima Holmes.
Rini Sampath: OK, yes.
Dave Statter: In 2022, the council wouldn’t confirm Holmes. They let the mayor know, and the mayor backed down. McGaffin was already working at the agency, so the mayor appointed her, and the council confirmed her.
To be fair to Heather McGaffin, she’s not without skills. She’s well thought of in the 911 industry. And she has a mayor who really wants the status quo, so I’m sure she’s been told not to shake things up. There was an interim director who did a good job shaking it up. She started to bring accountability and transparency, and the mayor didn’t like that. That was that woman’s downfall. McGaffin has gone along.
My biggest criticism of her is the lack of transparency and accountability. She promised transparency. She basically said that when there are mistakes, you’ll hear it first from us. That never happened.
Take the families of the people who lost dogs at District Dogs when there was a flood. She never told the whole truth about what happened. She withheld information, including from the council, which still doesn’t have the document I uncovered showing what really happened. The two 911 call takers never entered into the computer that there were dogs and people stuck in the flood, possibly in danger of drowning. She never mentioned that when she talked to the families or to the public. That’s the biggest one: no transparency, no accountability.
The other is that she’s let things continue that are so basic in the 911 world, yet she can’t solve them. One I’ve been reporting on since before she arrived, and which happened again just last week, is dispatchers on the fire and EMS side ignoring radio traffic for minutes at a time. They turn the volume down, unplug the headset, or patch channels in a way that blocks the traffic out.
The interim director in 2021, Cleo Subido, solved that problem. But McGaffin allowed them to go back to all the bad habits that cause it. Under her watch, there have been 30 incidents that I know of, and probably more. Answering emergency radio traffic is the basic job of the agency. If you don’t answer it for two, three or four minutes at a time, you hurt service.
Rini Sampath: Absolutely. That’s very helpful.
The case of Will Ostertag
Rini Sampath: I want to bring this back to personal experience. When you tell stories like the one at the start of our episode, about the young man told by a call taker to grow up, it pulls at people’s heartstrings and reminds them this is worth advocating for. Can you help listeners understand Will’s case as one example of OUC’s failures? I think it would make what’s going on more concrete, since we’ve been talking in somewhat abstract terms. Tell us what happened and where the response went wrong.
Dave Statter: This was November 3, 2024. Will Ostertag was a 28-year-old man working out in his apartment building’s gym on 14th Street in Columbia Heights. He collapsed and was found by someone passing through the gym, who relayed word to the front desk. The front desk called 911.
The original call was classified as a seizure. A seizure is considered a basic life support incident, which gets EMTs, not paramedics. Was that the right classification? I’ve never personally heard the 911 call, but I know people who have. People who know the business tell me it probably should have been classified as an advanced life support call and gotten paramedics.
Why does that matter so much in this case? Immediately next door to that apartment building, just a couple hundred feet from the gym, paramedics sat in the Columbia Heights firehouse. They didn’t go on the call initially because it was listed as a seizure. The EMTs who were dispatched came from Connecticut Avenue. That would be standard if it were just a seizure, and that may be a judgment call.
But here’s what’s factual, and where the real mistakes happened, beyond any doubt. A couple of minutes into the incident, a second call came in saying CPR was in progress. That should have immediately upgraded the call and alerted the firefighters and medics next door. It took another three to four minutes to react. The call takers seem to have done a good job, but the dispatch side didn’t get the message. Maybe they didn’t read the notes. I can’t tell you exactly what happened there, but it took three to four minutes before they alerted the station.
In a cardiac arrest, losing minutes like that is terrible. It can mean the difference between life and death. Once the crew next door was alerted, they were with Will in moments. It was an ideal situation to have them that close. They got the defibrillator on him, shocked his heart and got a rhythm back. He lost it, and they got it back again. Unfortunately, Will was in the hospital for many days, never regained brain function and died there.
I wasn’t alerted to this one. I didn’t find out about it until about a year later, when his mother, Stephanie Clemens, called me. She knew of my work and wanted to find out more about her son’s death, and I was able to help her. It took a few months; we didn’t rush. We ended up with a team helping her, including a lawyer and someone who knew open records.
DC 911 didn’t want to give her the records. She sent FOIA requests to both OUC and DC Fire. DC Fire immediately gave her all the medical records. She couldn’t get the 911 call or anything useful out of OUC beyond a timeline. It took her going public, with a press conference and testimony at a hearing. Once The Washington Post story came out, she heard from OUC within about 90 minutes to two hours, and they gave her the 911 calls. That’s what we had to do to get them for her.
The case of Shelly Shepard
Rini Sampath: Can you walk us through another case that has stayed with you, from the first call for help to what you later uncovered?
Dave Statter: I should explain that I did straight reporting for years on TV and radio. Now I call what I do advocacy journalism. I want to make a difference. I’ve said from the start that my goal is real reform at DC 911, and I’m passionate about it. I’ve worked with a number of families.
The one that really sticks with me is from June 5, 2020. Shelly Shepard, a woman in her 50s, collapsed in sudden cardiac arrest in front of her 13-year-old daughter, Maria. Maria picked up the phone and called 911, and as far as we can tell, she did everything right. She started CPR on her mom and stayed on the phone with 911. She was told help was on the way. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. They lived on Oglethorpe Street Northeast, and everybody was sent to Oglethorpe Street Northwest, the wrong quadrant of the city.
Here’s why this one is so bad. I reported it just a couple of days after it happened, though I didn’t know what the mistake was. People inside 911 told me they had sent units to the wrong place, in this case and another a few days earlier, but I hadn’t confirmed it. For five months, OUC wouldn’t talk about it. The director then, Karima Holmes, acted like she didn’t even know about the call, which I’ve proven isn’t the case.
For five months, they let this family hang, not knowing what happened. The family didn’t know whether Maria had given the right address. OUC knew immediately, and they didn’t tell the family. The only reason the family knows today is a national industry publication called Communications Daily. They called me and said they’d like to follow up on some of my stories by filing FOIA requests. Amazingly, they got records back for two of the cases, including this one, along with the 911 call.
It showed clearly that the call taker made the mistake and entered the wrong quadrant. Why leave the family on the hook for five months? That’s the one I found so cruel. There are other cruel ones like it, but this 13-year-old girl did not deserve that.
Rini Sampath: That’s heartbreaking, and it feels very unethical.
How Dave reports
Rini Sampath: Can you walk us through how you piece all this together? What usually first catches your attention, and how do you turn that into a timeline you can verify? Tell us about the radio traffic you’re listening to and the other sources you use.
Dave Statter: I always remind people that the facts come first and my opinion comes second. My opinion is led by the facts.
The process usually starts one of two ways. I have the radios on all the time here. I didn’t for a number of years, and decided to start listening again when I became interested in what OUC was doing. So either I hear something myself, or somebody gives me a tip. Often it’s somebody in DC Fire and EMS who saw the problem. In recent years, I’ve also had quite a few people inside OUC tip me off. Then I go and look.
What has helped most, and made all the difference in the world, is a site called OpenMHz.com. A man named Luke Berndt created it in about 2019, just before I started this. It records all the radio traffic that’s open, not encrypted, from DC police and fire. Police has only one open channel, but fire and EMS have several. It puts time codes on everything, and it’s very accurate, so I can build my own timeline of what happened. That’s allowed me to do a lot of this reporting.
I used to hear from OUC, and I always reached out to them, until they started basically gaslighting me. That went on for a while. I don’t work for a big news organization anymore, so I don’t have to follow its standards. I want to be fair, and I was willing to withhold a story to give them a chance to respond. But they’d say they would and never come through. So I told them: you know how to reach me if you want to respond to a story, and I’ll even turn my blog over to you.
I don’t hear from them, that’s for sure. They stopped communicating with me a long time ago, and I don’t even reach out anymore. I’d like to. I’d like to hear their side. A couple of times, they had great information for me about incidents, and I wish I still had that.
When I don’t know something, I say so. You can’t know everything from the radio traffic. I’d like to know what happened during the 911 calls, but that’s rare unless I have a source. So you’re only getting part of the story. I’m very clear when we know for certain that it’s an OUC mistake, and when I’m not sure, I say that too: this is what I know, and this is what I don’t. Then I follow up. Sometimes I have the recordings of the 911 calls, and I check other information with people I trust.
It’s worked. They’ve criticized me greatly for many years and made accusations about me. OUC even sent me a cease-and-desist letter a number of years ago.
Rini Sampath: Wow.
Dave Statter: It’s true. Their legal counsel sent it. It was about my using their logo in my reports and using addresses. I had some wonderful pro bono legal help, we sent a letter back, and they never answered. But they’ve never questioned the facts. I’m sure I’ve made some minor errors, but no substantive facts have changed a story. I’ve worked hard to be accurate, and if I make a mistake, I’ll say so.
Rini Sampath: Absolutely.
What the next director needs
Rini Sampath: We’ll link listeners to Dave’s site and his X account. As I mentioned, Heather McGaffin moves to Alexandria in the new year, which gives DC another leadership decision. If you could sit down with our mayor-elect, what traits or qualifications would you ask her to look for in the next OUC director?
Dave Statter: I’d love that opportunity. But let me say this about Janeese Lewis George and DC 911. She and Elissa Silverman were among the first councilmembers to look at my reporting and follow up on their own, asking questions of the OUC directors without me lobbying them. I’ve seen her interviews about OUC. She’s saying all the right things in a way I’ve never heard from anyone in DC leadership, except you when you were running for mayor. The two of you are the only ones who have talked seriously about OUC reform.
I hope it’s a 911 director or a public safety director, maybe even a fire chief: somebody with solid public safety experience who understands what 911 involves, can solve problems, holds the people who work there accountable, and gives them good training and good leadership. It should be someone who has done this in a large city or jurisdiction that handles lots of calls and lots of different problems. This is a troubled agency that needs to change, and the change has to come soon.
I really hope it means transparency and accountability. The new administration should come in and say: we know there are problems, we’re going to be the ones who tell you about them, and we’ll keep doing that. The most important reason is that they need to win back the public’s trust, and you do that with honesty and candor, from the very beginning. I don’t think people will blame them for problems early on, as long as they’re trying to solve them.
Good leaders know this. You tell people about your mistakes, what you’re doing about them, and what you’re doing to make sure they don’t happen again. That’s what good leadership does, and it hasn’t been done at OUC.
The first 90 days
Rini Sampath: To close, what priorities would you want the incoming administration to deliver in its first 90 days? And six months later, what would tell you they really followed through?
Dave Statter: They have to come in and change the attitude there: we can do this, we will do this, and we’ll hold ourselves to a standard. We’re not going to accept mediocrity anymore. The priority is to get the job done, learn from mistakes and have good quality assurance that looks at the work every day. There are patterns in the mistakes I’ve found that can easily be addressed, like not answering the radios.
You ask how I’ll know in six months whether things have changed. When that interim director came in and started holding people accountable, the cases of unanswered radio traffic stopped. When she was gone, I said, let’s see how long before it starts again. It was only a month or so, and it has continued unabated ever since. So if radio channels stop being abandoned, that tells me they’re making progress, because it’s very important.
There’s another problem developing right now. One thing Heather McGaffin did well was hiring. The agency had a terrible staffing problem for a long time that the Bowser administration ignored. McGaffin started hiring and paying a controversial bonus: show up for all your shifts in a month, and you get a bonus. It worked for a while, and the number of calls answered slowly dropped quickly. But it’s going back up. Since August, at least one or two days a week, almost 20% of calls take more than 15 seconds to answer, which means callers are getting the recording.
That’s an important statistic, but not the only one. I think the previous administration focused too much on it. We need to start getting the errors down, and that’s where you look at the patterns. After about six months of the interim director’s changes, I could tell from just listening to the radio that things were different. I think that could happen again with the right leadership.
Rini Sampath: Anything else you want to leave us with?
Dave Statter: It’s not about me. I spoke to ANC 2B last week, my second time there. Change will never happen from my reporting alone. We need the ANCs. We need people like you. We need everybody to make this a priority. The news media has never made it a priority, and for the most part neither have the politicians. The new mayor says it’s going to be one. It’s important for the ANCs and everyone else to make sure she stays on it, because it’s easy to think you’ve solved a problem when you haven’t.
It’s the people who live and work in the District, which I don’t, who need to follow up on my reporting, just as they did with the audit. That’s how the audit came about: some ANC commissioners picked up on my reporting and asked [DC Auditor] Kathy Patterson to look into it. Kathy brought me onto her staff, and that’s where the audit came from. Change will happen because citizens want it. So make sure the new mayor keeps hearing how important 911 is, and I know you will.
Rini Sampath: Thank you, Dave. I appreciate you walking us through these cases and how you report them. We learned so much from you today, and we’ll link to your work. His handle is Statter911 on social media. Please check it out, and we’ll add the DC 911 article about Dave’s work in the episode notes.
Thank you, everyone, for listening to Capital Commonsense. We’ll catch you next time. Capital Commonsense is powered by listeners like you. Visit us at capitalcommonsense.com.
