I would like to provide another view of the 3-1-1 issue - that of a law
enforcement officer who lives in Ward 3.

Typically, calls to 3-1-1 are for lower priority calls for service (i.e.,
not life threatening emergencies or crimes in progress). Such calls are
dispatched when units assigned to the Patrol Service Area (PSA) are
available - units from other PSAs typically are not diverted from their PSAs
for low-priority calls in order to assure their swift availability within
their PSAs - and often units dispatched on such calls can be diverted to
higher priority runs if warranted. Ms. LeRoy doesn't indicate when she
discovered the damaged vehicles, but the time of the day and the day of the
week can have a major impact on the availability of units to handle runs.
The officer assigned to the call has 30 minutes to complete the call or
request additional time from the dispatcher. This includes the time that it
takes for the officer to drive to the scene, interview the citizen who is
making the complaint, and gather the facts needed to write the report. The
time that the officer arrives on the scene is time-stamped in the
Computer-Aided Dispatch (CAD) system, and it is extremely unlikely that an
officer would request "additional time" for such a run if the officer had an
unjustifiably long response time. My guess is that the first-available
officer was dispatched as soon as possible and that the officer drove to the
scene in a safe and reasonable manner (i.e., not using lights and siren).
In my book, to receive service "within the hour" and have an officer take a
report on a crime that has virtually no chance of being solved is nothing to
complain about. Of course response times could be lowered by having more
officers on duty (hence increasing the likelihood of any given officer being
available for a call), but that costs more money. At bottom, it is a
balancing act between instantaneous police service and cost-effective police
service.

On the second point that Concerned Citizen makes, that of the officer not
being willing to take a report on the other vehicles, there is a simple
procedural issue at play here. Police reports for damaged property require
a "complainant" - typically the owner of the property or someone in a
position to make a complaint on behalf of the owner (i.e., an employee or
tenant). The fact that Ms. LeRoy made a complaint about her vehicle does
not legally permit (or require) her to make a complaint on behalf of the
others whose vehicles were damaged. The officer on the scene no doubt took
the information about the other damaged vehicles and made an entry in his
notebook and on the report for Ms. LeRoy. Without a complainant for the
other vehicles, he could not take a police report. The operative assumption
is that the owners of the other vehicles will call the police department to
make a report for their own vehicles.

I am guessing that someone will probably ask why the responding officer
didn't simply "run" the license plates to get the names of the registered
owners of the vehicles and contact the owners proactively, so let me address
that proactively. First, the officer should not run a list of license
plates via the radio - doing so poses an officer safety problem because it
consumes valuable "air time" that another officer might need in order to
summon assistance in an emergency. Running a license plate takes time -
both of humans and computers. Further, gathering information this way is a
low-yield technique for contacting vehicle owners. While the DC license
plates will undoubtedly result in a registered owner on file, out-of-state
plates are less certain. Sometimes vehicles are registered to corporations
(e.g., rental car companies) which may not be reachable (especially on a
weekend). Even with a registered owner's information, many people have
unlisted phone numbers or cell phones. Finally, owners are often out of
town for extended periods (e.g., business trips and vacations). An officer
could spend literally hours running a list of licenses only to be able to
contact a few owners. During this time, the officer is not available to do
other things (like patrolling a neighborhood). It is significantly more
cost-effective to let the owners of the vehicles contact the police
department, even if it means sending an officer back to the scene a number
of times. In fact, frequently an officer who has gathered the information
once and is called back to the scene for additional complainants needs only
to get the complainant information in order to complete a report - in other
words, the repeat trips are more efficient.

I hope that this information clarifies why Ms. LeRoy is correct, in my
opinion, in her assertion that she received good service from 3-1-1 and the
Metropolitan Police Department.

-- Erik S. Gaull

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Lt. Erik S. Gaull

Reserve Unit Platoon Leader

Second District -- Metropolitan Police Department

3320 Idaho Ave., NW
Washington, DC 20016

Office: (202) 730-1918
MPD Text Pager: (202) 996-7563
Fax: (202) 715-7382

For more information on the Second District, please visit:
http://mpdc.dc.gov/mpdc/cwp/view,a,1239,q,544652,mpdcNav_GID,1535.asp
<https://outlook.dc.gov/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://mpdc.dc.gov/mpdc/cw
p/view,a,1239,q,544652,mpdcNav_GID,1535.asp>

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