A lawsuit filed this week alleges chronic problems at Cincinnati’s Emergency Communications Center (ECC), including misclassified 911 calls and unwritten policies designed to hide errors by suppressing public records.
The suit stems from the death of 19-year-old Amir Jordan about two years ago. A Cincinnati Police officer responding to a 911 call hit and killed Jordan, who was crossing the street. The lawsuit says that 911 call was improperly classified as an active situation involving a shooter.
“In this case, the central problem is and was the enormous difference between what the Emergency Communications Center knew to be the facts and what was understood by the officers in the field responding to the call for service,” said attorney Zach Gottesman.
This article describes claims made in a lawsuit; the defendants have not responded to the claims in court. Unless otherwise indicated, WVXU has not independently verified the claims.
The suit names the city itself as well as City Manager Sheryl Long, ECC Director Bill Vedra, and four other ECC employees: a deputy director, an operations manager, a police dispatcher, and a call taker. A city spokesperson declined to comment, saying the city does not comment on pending litigation.
“[The] reckless misclassification triggered and prolonged a dangerous and wholly unnecessary lights-and-sirens police response through City streets,” the suit says, adding this “misclassification was neither isolated nor unforeseeable.”
The lawsuit also alleges that city officials conspired to deceive Jordan’s family about the circumstances of his death, and that this deception is part of a larger pattern of concealing problems at the ECC.
“We have a witness … who has sworn to this under oath, that the director of the ECC had a policy not to document the failures of the ECC,” said attorney Tom Bruns.
Amir Jordan’s death
Amir Jordan was killed on Aug. 29, 2024.
His mother, Shenee McClendon, filed the lawsuit and appeared at a press conference Wednesday but declined to comment. Paula McClendon, Amir Jordan’s grandmother, says her husband died by suicide about a year ago.
“I suffer with anxiety, panic attacks, just breakdowns,” she told reporters Wednesday. “I mean, the real joy in my life has been taken away – that’s Amir and my husband. We had 48 years together. So my life, a lot of times, just feels empty.”
The lawsuit says Jordan left a Metro bus and was “lawfully” crossing Este Ave. near Chickering Ave. in Winton Hills.
“At approximately 5:56 p.m., he was struck and killed by a Cincinnati Police Department vehicle responding in emergency mode to a 9-1-1 call that the City of Cincinnati Emergency Communications Center (‘ECC’) had wrongfully classified as a Priority 1-Red ‘Shooting (JO)’ incident,” the complaint says.
The CPD officer had been dispatched to respond to a 911 call first placed at 5:47 p.m.
The CAD report indicates the call-taker, who is named in the lawsuit, documented the call as “FEMALE SHOT AT COMP …” and classified the complaint as a shooting. This caused the call to be classified as “Priority 1-Red.”
The call was then disconnected, and the call-taker added additional information to the report:
- At 5:50:03, that the caller stated “female shot at him” and the windshield on a vehicle was broken.
- At 5:50:13, that the caller stated “he was not shot” and “female fired shots” at the location.
At 5:51:04, an ECC dispatcher assigned six CPD units to respond.
By that time, the call-taker had reconnected with the original caller; at 5:51:40, more information was entered, including that the woman who reportedly shot a gun was no longer on the scene, as well as a description of the woman and the vehicle she left in.
The dispatcher sent an additional two units to the scene, one at 5:53:52 and another at 5:54:51.
“[The defendants] had almost five full minutes to slow down the dangerous and wholly unnecessary emergency response after they learned that the caller was not shot and the alleged female shooter was no longer on scene, yet neither took required steps to slow down the responding officers,” the complaint says.
Why not sue the police department?
Gottesman, the lead attorney on the lawsuit, specializes in representing police officers and other first responders in court.
He says Cincinnati Police officers have reported to him “they have concerns over the accuracy of what they’re being told [and] they doubt the truthfulness when they are told there’s a situation that requires an emergency response.” He says that’s how this particular situation came to his attention.
“We’re not criticizing the officer driving that car – he believed he was enroute to an active shooter situation, doing what he was supposed to do: protect and serve,” Gottesman said. “This is not his fault, but his life has been affected, too, because he struck somebody, killed somebody.”
Cincinnati police have amended rules for how officers use their vehicles in other scenarios.
CPD created a policy on vehicle pursuits in 2022, saying officers can only chase a vehicle in cases of violent offenses. Officials said at the time that it was not a response to a deadly high-speed chase in 2020 that ended in a crash in which two bystanders were killed.
Kyle Plush and ECC reform
The Cincinnati Emergency Communications Center, which is separate from the Hamilton County Communication Center (911), answers approximately 350,000 911 calls annually, Karli Piper, CECC deputy director, told WVXU in 2024.
Overall, the center answers around a million calls when you factor in 311 (the city's non-emergency customer service line) and other non-emergency calls.
The lawsuit filed this week draws a direct comparison to the 2018 death of Kyle Plush, a 16-year-old who called 911 twice after becoming trapped in his vehicle. A series of failures described by consultants as a "perfect storm" meant responding officers did not locate him. His father found him suffocated about six hours after the first 911 call was made.
Plush’s family filed a wrongful death lawsuit and reached a settlement with the city in 2021; the city paid the family $6 million and agreed to a five-year reform plan requiring the city to bring in three 911 experts as an advisory panel.
“The stated purpose of these reforms was to prevent the recurrence of precisely the type of emergency-communications failure that later caused Amir’s death,” the new lawsuit says.
The complaint also includes three instances of misclassified calls related to guns. An email from an ECC dispatch supervisor in 2022 noted two such cases as examples of “a dramatic uptick in the number of ‘GUN’ runs that really don’t justify the coding.”
- a call from someone who did not want to see police, was no longer on scene, and the suspect was “GOA” (Gone On Arrival). The call should have been coded as “INFO” but was coded as “GUN.”
- A robbery that was coded “GUN” because a gun was used during the offense
Separate documents describe a call in June 2024 that was classified as a “Drive-By Shooting” that involved a BB gun, and the alleged suspects had gone into a house before the 911 call was even placed.
An email from the same dispatch supervisor says a CPD lieutenant flagged the call “as an example of when police are going lights and sirens for what is not really a shooting” with concern that “police officers are going quickly to get to a scene of a bb gun (and sometimes airsoft) being used, which can be danger to civilians and police.”
According to the lawsuit, all these instances should have been documented in an Agency Liability Report.
The complaint points out the ECC’s Standard Operating Procedure 5.150 states these reports should be generated “anytime there is an incident wherein its employees have allegedly performed in a manner that created an increased likeliness of death or injury to persons or significant loss of property.” The policy also states the ECC should conduct an annual analysis of these reports.
That policy went into effect in March 2021. Attorneys say they submitted a public records request for all Agency Liability reports through Dec. 31, 2024; the response included just one internal investigation related to an EMS call.
Alleged “suppressing” of public records
The lawsuit includes a sworn affidavit from someone who worked as ECC Director Vedra’s administrative assistant from September 2023 until mid-July 2026. The statement says the assistant was required to attend management and other meetings, which included attendance by several of the named defendants, but not City Manager Long.
“Director Vedra prohibited the electronic recording of meetings even with the consent of all persons present,” the statement says. “Director Vedra repeatedly stated that he was prohibiting electronic recordings because it would generate a public record that would then be subject to Ohio’s public records laws.”
Instead, the assistant says they were directed to use handwritten notes from the meetings “to generate inaccurate and/or incomplete minutes that omitted reference to any human or system-wide failure of the ECC, even if those failures were recurrent because he didn’t want a public record of it.”
The statement also claims Vedra enforced an unwritten policy that was “frequently stated and widely understood” that prohibited using email to communicate about failures to “avoid generating any public record that adversely reflected on the performance of the ECC.”
What happens next
The complaint includes six claims for relief: wrongful death, conscious pain and suffering, wanton and/or reckless misclassification, wanton and/or reckless dispatch conduct, wanton and reckless misconduct by ECC supervisory defendants, and malicious civil conspiracy to commit fraudulent misrepresentation and concealment.
The suit requests compensatory damages; attorneys would not name an exact amount, but the complaint says “in excess of $25,000 to be determined by the jury.”
It also requests wrongful-death damages, survival damages, and punitive damages.
“We’re hoping for accountability up and down the line,” Gottesman said.
The suit also requests oversight, “including court-supervised reforms to ECC call prioritization, classification, dispatch, Agency Liability Reporting, training, supervision, auditing, and quality-assurance systems necessary to prevent similar deaths and injuries.”
Gottesman says they are open to settlement negotiations with the city.
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