The Santa Cruz County Regional 9-1-1 Annual Report for 2021 was released Thursday during a regular board meeting for the agency, better known as Netcom. The 25-year-old joint powers authority, based in a call center high in DeLaveaga Park, dispatches emergency calls for ambulance and city and county police and fire services, with the exception of the Scotts Valley Police Department. It also serves several agencies in San Benito County .
The report details high-intensity challenges occurring during the year, ranging from dispatcher COVID-19 outbreaks and debris flows to wind storms and an atmospheric river.
On Aug. 18 , dispatchers Anne Escobar and Melanie Sherwood organized emergency response to a 30-person surf school that got caught in the ocean's high tide off East Cliff Drive. Dispatcher Samantha Preciado successfully spent four minutes carefully instructing a caller, step-by-step, on the Heimlich maneuver for an actively choking patient. Dispatcher Areli Sanchez talked a caller, home alone with an intruder scratching on her window, until police arrived and encountered "an extremely intoxicated subject" outside the woman's home. Dispatcher PJ Garza took a call for a patient not breathing on a San Benito County recreational trail. Dispatcher Christina Corral then spent the next 20 minutes talking the friend of the patient through continuing CPR while gathering information on the duo's remote location. Arriving emergency responders were able to take over and revive the patient.
In 2021, Netcom processed more than 390,000 calls for service, according to the report. Parsed out by individual agencies, the call workload showed a nearly 6% drop from 2020. Even more dramatically, law enforcement officer-initiated calls for service — when officers report in on duties not assigned by a dispatcher — declined by more than 25% in that same period, according to the report. Capitola Police Department , in particular, showed a steep decline in both areas — cutting its officer-initiated calls by nearly half from the year prior and its calls for service by nearly 26%. Santa Cruz Police Department also saw a nearly 41% drop in officer-initiated calls.
"I think this usually speaks to staffing. When police departments are fully staffed, when the Sheriff's Office is fully staffed, they're able to engage in proactive interactions with the community that get documented as calls for service," Netcom General Manager Amethyst Uchida told the board. "When they're short-staffed, they're really just responding to the calls and the items created for them by dispatch."
Several law enforcement agencies, including Capitola police, have seen their top management positions change in the past two years, another potential factor in how officers interact with the dispatch center.
On the public side of the equation, as the coronavirus pandemic struck locally in 2020, the region's overall 911 calls dipped in response, according to Uchida. That change, she told the board, was a national trend and not unexpected. Total dispatch calls, however, unexpectedly continued to decline in 2021, Uchida said.
"2020 was an oddball year in that phone calls went down a lot, partially due to stay-at-home orders and the changing lifestyle under COVID," Uchida said. "I would have expected the phone calls to rebound. If you look at the top section of this report, total 911 calls rebounded. In 2020, they were down to 137,811 and this year they were back up to 142,118. But the non-emergency calls are what didn't rebound. So, we have an overall decrease in processed calls of 1%."
Uchida said the pandemic took its toll on the dispatcher center's staffing, as well, listing recruitment and retention as "a big issue for us" in 2022. Netcom started the fiscal year with fewer than 30 dispatchers, despite being authorized for 40 positions.
Read the full 2021 annual report online at scr911.org/general/page/annual-reports.
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