by globalgirl and mal contends

Madison, WI - We have heard numerous comments in conversation from friends and family fearful that there are just too many bigoted idiots in America to let Barack Obama live to be president.

 
Our common response is that: Though I do not know it for a fact, the United States Secret Service, created after the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901, is surely a dynamic, continuously improving organization. A would-be assassin's shot like that taken at Ronald Reagan in 1981 is undoubtedly nearly impossible today. It would take a military assault to get to Obama, I bet, I hope.

Dane County 911 Center

Closer to home another public service and protection agency, the Dane County 911 Center apparently doesn't have a lessons-learned, dynamic approach to quality improvement.

Matthew Defour's piece in Sunday's Wisconsin State Journal reveals that:

Dane County's emergency dispatch center has kept incomplete and disorganized records of police complaints about its shortcomings, limiting its ability to prevent potentially life-and-death mistakes such as those that happened at the 911 center the day Brittany Zimmermann was killed.

Local police, fire and emergency medical workers are part of the problem -- many do not file formal complaints about 911 mistakes, instead relying on casual communication with center officials to correct shortcomings.
But even problems that are communicated in writing are not systematically being recorded, which experts say would allow dispatch center managers to spot troubling patterns and intercede with training.

No one expects the 911 center to have the sophisication of the Secret Service, but Jesus H., the only apparent dyanmic, lessons-learned phase in place has been the reporting of Bill Lueders and Jason Shepard at Isthmus and the Wisconsin State Journal.