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Rita Gahagan.

Remember that name.

Gahagan is the 911 police dispatcher who dismissed the emergency phone call of UW-Madison student Brittany Zimmerman.

From the Journal Sentinel:

Madison Police Chief Noble Wray said evidence on the call should have been heard by the 911 dispatcher who handled the call and that should have prompted her to send police. Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk said the call contained “significant sounds” that were not heard by the dispatcher.

Joe Norwick, director of the Dane County Public Safety Communications Center, originally said the dispatcher who took the call asked several times if there was an emergency but got no response.

The Journal Sentinel, to its immense credit, is pushing for the release of documents surrounding the call and the Dane County 911 Call Center:

The Journal Sentinel and three other media organizations have sued Dane County and the City of Madison for withholding public records, including the tape of the 911 call.

The lawsuit says that the 911 system is maintained at public expense for the public’s benefit, and the system’s effectiveness has been called into question by developments in the Zimmermann case.

Rita Gahagan, the Madison Police Department and the Dane County Sheriff’s Department are going to have to live for the rest of their lives with the fruit of their incompetence: yet another likely preventable homicide in Madison.

I often criticize Marquette for the security situation around campus: too little honestly on behalf of University bureaucrats engaging in constant CYA behavior. I’ve always thought that DPS to a vast extent, however, is very serious about its job.

(I continue to long for the day when MPD becomes more serious about its own job. MU wouldn’t need 40 DPS officers if the solution to crime was more than leaving an empty squad car on campus the past 2 weeks, as someone relayed to me.)

At Marquette, fortunately, I’ve never had to worry about elemental criminal prevention or victim response. It seems as if in Madison, however, basic functionality of police departments is non-existent.

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