Chris Graves

cgraves@enquirer.com

Peggy Shannon is just the kind of resident Cincinnati police say they need in their fight against crime.

Some may even say the Northside homeowner bleeds blue. She knows cops by name, routinely stops by the district office with cookies for each shift and pays attention to crime statistics. She calls to report neighborhood issues and crime.

Simply put, Shannon gets involved.

And that's exactly what she was doing on Jan. 11, when she repeatedly called 911 to report a disorderly man who was growing increasingly disoriented and violent on her neighbor's front porch. At one point, he had a brick in his hand and looked like he was trying to bust in. And, she knew, her neighbor had a loaded gun and was prepared to use it.

She and her neighbors told 911 operators all of that.

Still, it took 48 minutes before a squad car arrived. The average response time for such calls is roughly seven to eight minutes citywide, a review of 911 response times shows.

"Forty-eight minutes is unbelievable when you consider the tragedy that could have occurred,'' Shannon said. "If he had gotten into the house and the homeowner had shot him, it would be equally tragic for him and the homeowners.

"In this case, I just don't think they were responding in a reasonable manner,'' she said.

Everyone from the city manager to the mayor to the District 5 captain agree the response was too slow.

They pointed to an officer-involved fatal shooting in West Price Hill that happened earlier that evening and a shift change as the reasons they didn't have enough cars to respond to Northside on those increasingly desperate calls.

"I think in this situation the response time was most likely too long,'' City Manager Harry Black said Friday. "But this was an unusual confluence of events ... I really think this was an isolated situation."

But Shannon wondered, too, if part of the reason was that several District 5 cars were deployed to an off-duty detail to help patrol around the University of Cincinnati's Clifton campus, which is in the same district as her neighborhood. UC pays for the extra patrols and the use of Cincinnati patrol cars. Officials could not answer how many cars were patrolling that night Shannon called 911 for help.

A frightening 48 minutes

None of that is particularly comforting to Michelle Gardner. She grew increasingly frightened as the disorderly man was kicking and hitting on her doors and windows at 4360 Hamilton Ave. with a brick about 9:50 p.m. on Jan. 11. The man had been screaming and shrieking for about 30 minutes before he went onto her family's porch, prompting the first 911 calls.

It was then that Gardner's husband, Gordon Follin, first called 911. The couple's two daughters, ages 9 and 7, were asleep at the time. The couple feared for their safety and for that of the man; he wasn't wearing a coat and had taken his socks and shoes off. The temperature was in the low 20s.

911 operators sent Follin's call to dispatchers who tried to dispatch an officer four minutes after Follin called. But the officer told the dispatcher he didn't have a car available to respond, according to a recording of the dispatch provided to The Enquirer through a public records request.

Increasingly worried, Gardner called 911 back six minutes later, telling them they had a gun and would shoot the man if he broke in.

"If this guy puts his hands through my glass, he's going to get shot. He's banging on the glass,'' Gardner told the operator.

"They are already dispatched, we've got a couple units on their way there so ... if he does bust through or anything at all, call me right back, OK?" the operator told her.

Listen to Gardner's 911 call:

Tick-tock.

Fifteen minutes after the first call, Shannon called 911. She had earlier called officers at the police district.

She again told an operator the man had a brick and was trying to break into Gardner's and Follin's home.

"This is my third call,'' she said to the operator.

"It looks like police are already on their way there,'' the operator responded.

Said Shannon of her neighbors: "They are inside, terrified."

The 911 operator assured Shannon police were on their way.

"Can you see how long it will take them? ... Can you tell them to hurry up? ...They have a gun, and if that man breaks in, they are going to shoot him."

Operator: "They are on their way."

But they weren't.

Listen to Shannon's 911 call:

After Shannon's call – 18 minutes now since that first call – the operator bumped the call to a higher priority. That meant the response time should have improved, according to records of response times for different priority calls.

Tick-tock. The neighbors waited.

At 29 minutes since the first call, another neighbor called 911.

And he didn't mince words.

"Do you guys actually ever send somebody?'' Terry Bazeley asked the operator. "Why aren't they sending somebody?"

Operator: "Ah, they've been dispatched."

"It's five minutes from headquarters, so 25 minutes later somebody should have been here," Bazeley implored.

Listen to Terry Bazeley's call:

By then, the man had left Gardner's porch and was outside Bazeley's house rattling a fence.

About 48 minutes after the first call, a police officer asked a dispatcher if that Northside call was still waiting, according to the dispatch recording. Just four minutes later, officers arrived at at the scene.

Roughly 15 minutes after that, officers arrested a 22-year-old man in the 1600 block of Chase Ave. who was described in the arrest report as "highly intoxicated, almost getting struck by cars.''

Gardner identified that man as the same guy who was on her porch. Her husband had given up and gone to bed by that time.

The suspect was taken to the Hamilton County Justice Center on a drunk and disorderly conduct charge. A report from Police Chief Elliot Isaac to Black notes that the "homeowners declined to press charges."

Gardner, however, said she wasn't asked if she wanted to press charges.

The officer was courteous and apologized repeatedly about the delay, saying they didn't have cars available earlier.

Gardner joked: "Maybe they should have a Kickstarter,'' referring to an online crowd-fundraiser effort.

But seriously, she reflected on the emotions of the evening.

"I was really angry and shocked that the police response was so slow,'' she said from Italy, where her family moved two days after the incident. Follin works for General Electric and was transferred there for his work. "I'm not sure what more I could have done, and for all I knew this guy was coming in the house."

"I've thought about why I was so scared. I was scared because no one was coming. If the police had responded in the typical five- to seven-minutes, we would have said it was just another night in Northside. Instead, we were left alone to figure it. Then we had to worry about the girls. And what's this guy's going to do? What is our response to him?"

Shannon was more matter-of-fact.

"This thing was escalating, and I was worried that we were going to have to fend for ourselves,'' she said. "I have a gun and I was thinking, 'OK, what can I do to help?' I shouldn't have to do that."

Assessing impact of UC contract

Shannon knows about the contract Cincinnati police have with UC to provide additional patrols. She is also aware the city is to get additional police officers and new cars soon to replace its aging fleet.

But none of that negated her fear or her expectation of basic police service as a taxpayer.

"I pay $9,000 in property taxes," she said. "Our neighborhood was not supposed to suffer because they are patrolling UC. Yes, they are getting reimbursed, but what about the cars and other equipment they are taking away?"

The contract, which expired Dec. 31, calls for three officers and one sergeant in cars to patrol the area around campus. The cops work off-duty from 9 p.m. to 3 a.m., seven days a week. UC also pays for an additional two cops to patrol on foot from the same hours every day. The university pays $5 an hour for each patrol car used. A new contract is being negotiated and is at UC, Cincinnati police spokeswoman Tiffaney Hardy said.

Cincinnati Police Capt. Bridget Bardua, the commander of District 5, was off Friday and unable to access records to determine how many patrol cars were deployed to UC on the night of the Northside call.

But both she and Assistant Police Chief David Bailey said they would be hard-pressed to pull off-duty officers from the UC-contracted work to answer routine 911 calls, which is how Bailey classified the Northside call.

The only time Bardua said she might consider it is if an officer was in harm's way and needed help -- exactly the kind of call the department had been dealing with over in West Price Hill all evening since 8 p.m. Exactly the kind of call that officials said pulled on-duty patrol cars out of Northside.

"UC pays for those,'' Bailey said. "Taking their cars away to conduct other city business? I would have a hard time doing that."

A confluence of events

The real issue the night of the Northside call was that officer-involved shooting, officials said.

Police cars are routinely pulled from across the city when there is a police-involved shooting, Bailey said. Calls are prioritized by urgency and are reassessed as a call either escalates or dissipates.

"You have to understand the whole system," Bailey said. "If people call in a disturbance, it goes to the bottom of the chain and it may get held for a certain amount of time. After an hour or so, we will call back and say we either have no cars available or we are on our way. At night, this is not uncommon."

What was uncommon that night was the police-involved shooting, which happened nearly two hours before the first call about the troublesome man in Northside.

"This was a huge critical incident,'' Hardy said, adding that cars were pulled from Districts 2, 4 and 5.

Said Bailey: "In District 5, there may have been three or four cars pulled out of there ... Police-involved shootings eat up a bunch of cars.

"This is really a no-brainer. What is not sinking in?"

Well, it wasn't a no-brainer to Shannon nor to Gardner, who were left to take the incident into their own hands. Gardner's husband – with that loaded gun in his pocket – ultimately approached the intoxicated man on his porch and told him to move along, which he did.

In cop-lingo, the call ended without incident: Nobody was hurt, an arrest was made and a man ended up sleeping off his bender in jail.

That's a good thing.

But as they say, sometimes the end doesn't justify the means.

Contact Chris at cgraves@enquirer.com