Second chances
This story left me a bit stunned:
The Detroit 911 operator who was convicted of willful neglect after she dismissed a 5-year-old boy’s emergency call about his unconscious mom is back on the job.
Sharon Nichols returned to work on Wednesday after an arbitrator decided she should be reinstated without back pay or retroactive benefits, police spokesman John Roach said Thursday.
In February 2006, Nichols disregarded Robert Turner’s 911 call that his mother had collapsed because she thought it was a joke. Another operator gave the boy a hard time when he called back hours later, but eventually dispatched police. Officers found 46-year-old Sherrill Turner dead.
Nichols did not do her job and possibly contributed to the death of Sherrill Turner. She did not just perform at the low end of the acceptable scale. According to a press release from the Wayne County Prosecutors Office, she “failed to adhere to the pattern of questioning designed to evaluate a call and she failed to treat the call as an emergency.” Unless Detroit could find no one else to take Nichols’s place, I cannot understand why she will be back on the job. I see it this way: if Nichols tried to get a job with me, I’d call her previous employer and ask under what conditions she had been let go. After finding out that she completely failed to do her job and this failure may have contributed to the death of someone, I’d move on to the next resume.