July 16, 2003

On June 22, a 911 caller says her special-needs son has run away twice in the past 24 hours, that he's locked himself in the bathroom, and that she wants police to come to the house to take her son to social services.

On June 24, a 911 caller says her special-needs son has run away. She also says he makes up stories. She says one story is that his mother is dead.

On June 24, a 911 caller says her special-needs brother has run away.

On July 3, a 911 caller says her son has run away.

On July 3, a 911 caller says the mother is holding down her special-needs son in the yard to keep him from running away.

On July 5, a 911 caller says her 15-year-old brother is threatening his mother with a 6-inch knife.

This is the story of Paul Childs' last two weeks on earth as told in the language of the 911 call. If you read the story that way, you see how the danger was being dialed up.

You see the last six of 50 911 calls made over 3 ½ years by the Childs family. You know already that following the last call, the boy who kept running away - the boy who, in fact, made many 911 calls himself, some when he was angry with his mom - ended up dead of four police gunshot wounds.

It's fair to guess, too, if you read the full listing, that this was a desperate family with many problems. There were threats. There were break-ins. There were other knives.

It's all caught on 911 tape.

Mostly, though, there seems to have been a developmentally disabled boy who had grown to puberty and who, if not violent, was apparently beyond his family's control. Helen Childs would say her son was trying to be a normal teenager. So, he'd hop a bus and try to see a world he wasn't quite capable of negotiating.

Was this a police problem?

Not unless you think police are social workers. I believe we all know the limits of community policing.

Was it a community problem?

That's the issue before us, and not one that's limited to a ministers' alliance.

I don't know which social services Paul Childs received. Privacy laws limit our knowledge here. But you can expect that the Childs family was not unknown in the Denver human services community.

But what I do know is that police are weary of 911 calls that shouldn't be 911 calls. Some people call 911 when the cat is up the tree. Some call when they get a bad haircut. Some call because they want to know what channel the game is on.

It's one thing to blame people desperate or lonely who call 911 because it's one number they know somebody will answer.

It's another to do something about it. One thing a city can do - one thing many cities have done - is to initiate a 311 program. Some 311 programs put you in touch with every city agency that is not the police emergency line. It can work, like the 911 call, on a 24-hour, seven-days-a-week basis. And in the best case, as in the program in Baltimore that mayor-elect John Hickenlooper is touting, the 311 number is tied into a computer called

CitiStat, which tracks calls and allows operators to dial into services immediately.

It's the kind of program Denver needs and one that just might have saved Paul Childs' life.

There could have been a different ending if in the weeks leading up to the fateful dispatch - in which the Childs family wanted only for someone to take the knife from Paul - there had been a different number to call that a counselor on a crisis line, instead of a cop in a cruiser, might have answered.

Don't take my word for this. Ask Denver Police Chief Gerry Whitman.

"There's a disconnect here," he is saying, "calling what should be 311 calls on 911, talking to 911 operators who are oriented toward a 911 emergency."

"A 311 operator is trained to recognize a certain kind of crisis and how to deal with it. In a 911 call, a cop goes to the scene, he might be 21 years old, and he's asked to immediately evaluate the situation."

The police are working on this. There are new programs to deal with situations like the Childs' tragedy. But putting this responsibility on the police without sufficient resources is putting far too much on the police.

Meanwhile, Mile High United Way, seeing the need, is planning a 211 program that, like a 311 call, would connect callers to health and human service agencies. But it's a long-term plan.

Why can't the city do its own now? You have the answer. But it's not a good one.

A 311 program, Whitman explains, "would cost less than multiple lawsuits. It's not just a customer satisfaction issue. It's a risk management issue."

He thinks it's an issue that trumps a tax cut.

"They can keep my refund," Whitman says. "I don't think my $300 is stimulating the economy."

And, let's face it, he's too busy answering the phone to get to the mall.

Mike Littwin's column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Call him at (303) 892-5428 or e-mail him at littwinm@rockymountainnews.com.

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