After years of left-wing riots and rising crime, you’d have to be nuts to want to become a police officer in our nation’s capital city – and that’s exactly why law enforcement at every level in Washington, D.C. is struggling. In recent days, reports revealed how so few people want to work in law enforcement that even the 911 dispatch system is struggling – and bosses in charge of it are paying out $800 bonuses just to encourage people to turn up to work on time.
No, that’s not a bonus for new workers – it’s a financial incentive for existing workers.
Insane.
According to reports, the 911 dispatch system in DC faces a crisis of employees failing to turn up to work, with massively unmanned shifts rising in occurrence every week. In July, the number of undermanned shifts rose from 24% – an already worryingly high figure – to a whopping 88%. It means that, at any one time, someone looking for help from the emergency services in Washington, D.C. might struggle just to get somebody to pick up the phone.
On top of people failing to turn up to work when they should, the dispatch system has also reportedly been plagued by massive IT failures. The IT hiccups have been so severe through 2024 that emergency calls have completely failed to come through as many as seven times. This year alone. In one instance, a five-month-old baby in D.C. died as loved ones attempted to call emergency services during a two-hour-long outage.
The new bonus to encourage workers to…turn up for work…was revealed in a staff memo sent on Tuesday morning by the director of D.C.’s Office of Unified Communications, Heather McGaffin.
In the email, McGaffin said that staffing is a “crucial” part of their work and that unscheduled call outs are increasing and causing difficulty for employees who are “continuously getting stuck, coming in early, and being asked to come in on days off.”
The new incentive is officially live as of August 13.
