Former emergency line operator Crenshanda Williams sentenced after hanging up phone on callers

CRENSHANDA Williams had people’s lives in her hands. But the 911 operator “systematically” hung up on callers thousands of times.

A FORMER 911 operator who hung up the phone “thousands” of times on people attempting to call in emergencies in Harris County, Texas in the US has been sentenced to jail time.

Crenshanda Williams, 44, was found guilty of interference with emergency telephone calls on Wednesday after “systematically” hanging up the phone on residents of Harris County, KTRK reported.

She was sentenced to 10 days in jail and 18 months’ probation.

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Ms Williams reportedly had an unusual number of “short calls” — which were no longer than 20 seconds.

According to the Houston Chronicle, prosecutors determined she had hung up on “thousands” of calls.

In one instance, emergency caller Jim Moten told KTRK he called 911 in 2016 after he spotted two vehicles speeding on a highway where people had been killed from speeding weeks earlier and thought his call had dropped after a few seconds.

Court documents, according to the news station, stated that Ms Williams had taken Mr Moten’s call and, before he could finish explaining his emergency, she reportedly said: “Ain’t nobody got time for this. For real.”

The dispatcher also hung up on a caller who tried to report a violent robbery, according to the Chronicle.

Ms Williams reportedly spent a year-and-a-half at the Houston Emergency Centre taking 911 calls. She was caught in August 2016 and fired.

“The citizens of Harris County rely on 911 operators to dispatch help in their time of need,” assistant district attorney Lauren Reeder said in a statement.

“When a public servant betrays the community’s trust and breaks the law, we have a responsibility to hold them criminally accountable.”

Ms Williams’ lawyer, Franklin Bynum, argued that his client “was going through a hard time in her life” when she hung up on the emergency calls, and said “punishing her doesn’t do anything to fix the problems that still exist at the emergency centre”.

It’s unclear what problems at the centre Mr Bynum was referring to.

The “state-of-the-art” centre was opened in 2003 as a consolidation of Houston’s three emergency communication centres.

This story originally appeared on Fox News and was reproduced with permission.