Dispatcher

Dispatcher:
What’s in a Name?

My tire was thumping
I thought it was flat
when I looked at the tire
I noticed your cat
Sorry

By Any Other Name
I spent a cumulative 22 years as an emergency services dispatcher. My most recent employer called that position a communicator. Other agencies call them different things: dispatcher, radio operator, telecommunicator, communications operator, 9•1•1 operator, 9•1•1 dispatcher, emergency communications technician, communications specialist, duty officer, desk officer.
No matter what you’re called, we all do the same thing and we all do different things. Some of us work in large agencies with 30+ dispatchers on duty at one time. Others of us work in small centers where we are the only one on duty. Some of us have to do the radio, answer the phone, run the teletype, and take complaints at the lobby window. Yet others of us have to do paperwork like records checks on arrested people, file police reports, prepare invoices and mail out bills, do the bookkeeping, and perform other secretarial and clerical chores.
I’ve been there and done all that.
I once talked with a dispatcher for a small town whose job entailed mostly police-related functions. However, when they received a report of a structure fire, it was his job to leave the dispatch room and drive the fire depratment’s tanker to the scene of the fire. He had to leave immediately. He would dispatch the fire call, call a secretary in to relieve him at the radio, dispatch a uniformed officer to discontinue patrol and come in to work the radio. Oftentimes, this dispatcher would pass the officer coming in to provide radio relief him as he drove the tanker to the fire.
I have never done that. I have worked large agencies and small agencies. I know that no matter what you call us, the dispatcher belongs to one of the most important professions in emergency services. If we do not perform effectively, how will field responders arrive in a timely manner at the scene of an emergency? We are expected to know what a police officer or a paramedic or a firefighter knows but without the same training.
This is the important thing about what we do, however. No matter what our various agencies call us and no matter what else we may have to do as part of our job, our job—our real job—is to get the appropriate help to the people who need that help with as few delays as possible. Say what you will; it all boils down to that.
We are problem solvers. We listen to other people's problems and then we determine what from the resources we have available to us can address those problems.
I don’t think it’s a hard job, but I know that not everyone can do it well. I’ve seen more people “wash out” or quit in frustration in this field than in any other that I’ve worked.

Why I Like My Job
I know that I liked doing it. I liked being a dispatcher. I’ve done other things that I’ve also liked, but I always seemed to come back to public safety dispatching. I once described a call that I worked to my wife. It was a fatality; a college-aged girl was killed in a head-on collision while another young person was airlifted out to a regional trauma center and three other people were transported to two local hospitals. I stopped my description when I noticed she had kind of sat back and was looking at me in an appraising manner. She asked me why I liked this so much. I had an answer, actually.
You don’t get much in the way of public recognition in this job. Few people have any idea what you do or how you do it. But sometimes, at the end of a day’s shift as you are packing up your belongings to head home, you come to the self-realization that you did a pretty good job.
It got busy. You moved around a lot of apparatus and a lot of people, and you passed along a lot of information, and you did it all without a single major mistake. Everything that needed to get done, got done, and in the right way. And sometimes, not very often, you understand, but once in while as you are driving home you realize that right now, right at that same moment, there is someone over at the hospital who is alive because you did your job right.

How It All Began
The first installation of 9•1•1 took place in Haleyville, Alabama, in January 1968. The town had a population of approximately 4,500 and was serviced by the Alabama Telephone Company (ATC). Just a week before, the United States Congress had mandated 9•1•1 as the national emergency number. This number was intended to be an easy-to-remember, no-coin method of reaching the correct law enforcement, fire, and EMS agency.
An ATC engineer made some quick changes to the company's small telephone system and that system was ready to accept 9•1•1 calls. A debate broke out about where 9•1•1 calls should be routed—to the police, the fire department, or to the local hospital. Local officials settled on the Haleyville Police Department and a red telephone. It was basic 9•1•1 service. They was no display of the caller’s phone number or location. Those refinements would come later.
The first 9•1•1 call from Haleyville was made by Alabama Speaker of the House Rankin Fite on February 16, 1968, to Tom Bevill, a U.S. Representative. Later, the two said they exchanged greetings, hung up, and “had coffee and doughnuts.”

System Types
A 9•1•1 system is considered to be either Basic or Enhanced. A Basic 9-1-1 system provides three-digit dialing, does not require money for pay telephones, and consists of intelligent routing to the Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) that handles the area from where the call is made. An Enhanced 9-1-1 system adds the ability to display the caller's address and telephone number at the PSAP for the dispatcher's reference.

Making a 9•1•1 Call
Where does it go?
Some people think that when they dial 9•1•1 that it goes into some Nationwide 9•1•1 Center out in the middle of the country somewhere. Actually, when you dial 9•1•1, the call goes to a local Public Safety Answering Point, usually the local 9•1•1 center, local police department or sheriff’s office, or the local fire department.
If you dial 9•1•1 in error, DO NOT hang up the telephone.
Stay on the phone and explain to the dispatcher that you dialed the number by mistake and that you do not have an emergency. Different agencies have different policies for handling 9•1•1 hang up calls. At the very least, you can expect that the 9•1•1 operator will call you back, and keep trying until contact is made. This ties up the 9•1•1 operator who could be answering other calls. At the worst, you will end up with an armed police officer at your door checking to make sure that every thing is okay where you are. We cannot just assume it was a mistake. You may have dialed 9•1•1 and then passed out from a heart attack or someone may have forced you to hang up at gunpoint.
Let the dispatcher ask you questions.
Don’t start talking faster than the normal human ear can hear. Don’t try to lead the conversation yourself. Dispatchers have been trained to ask questions that will help them locate the incident, prioritize it, and dispatch an appropriate response. Your answers should be brief and responsive. Remain calm. Speak clearly. If you are not in a position to give full answers to the dispatcher because, for example, the suspect is nearby, stay on the phone and the dispatcher will ask you questions that can be answered “yes” or “no.”
This will be frustrating for you. You will want to blurt out everything that is happening. Try to avoid that, and let the dispatcher lead the conversation. It will speed up processing of your call and thus get you the help that you need faster.

Why So Many Questions?
I've read studies concluding that the overwhelming majority of people in the United States will never call 9•1•1 even once their entire lives. In talking with people who have done so, however, one question always seems to pop up: why did they ask me so many questions? Why couldn't they just send someone?
A reasonable question. The answers are just as reasonable.
First and foremost, the dispatcher wants to make sure they can find you. This may seem simplified and absurdly obvious, however, remember that the people coming out to you are in very distinctive vehicles and wearing uniforms that make them stand out from their surroundings and in a crowd. You probably do not. They can’t help you if they can’t find you, so the dispatcher will want to make certain there is no ambiguity about where you are.
If it’s a law enforcement call, the dispatcher will want to make sure they can distinguish between you and the bad guy. Again, this sounds absurdly obvious; however, you know who you are but the responding officer doesn’t know you or the person you are reporting. Additionally, a good description of the bad guy can help prevent the bad guy’s walking right past the officer but the officer not knowing it at the time. He needs to know who he’s looking for.
There is also the issue of safety. The responding units, police, fire, or medical, need to know that it is safe for them to come to where you are. They don’t want to get hurt, and they don’t want anyone else getting hurt because of their sudden appearance at a scene which is volatile. The dispatcher needs information from you to determine just how dangerous the scene is. Believe me, this is more than an abstract concern. Any dispatcher who works a “shots fired, officer down” call never forgets the experience.
If you are calling for an ambulance, remember this: you are already there. It will take time, even if only a couple of minutes, for the ambulance to get to your location. The dispatcher isn’t there and can take no direct action to help the person. You, however, are there, and you can take direct action. That is what the dispatcher will want to do: by using the dispatcher’s training and your being able to help the victim by following the dispatcher’s instructions, response time can be reduced to zero. We can tell you what to do, whether it’s just applying a towel to a cut or whether it’s how to start CPR. Before doing that, we have to know certain critical things, and the only way we can know those things is to ask you and for you to tell us. That’s another reason for all those questions.

The Dispatcher’s Reaction
Calling 9•1•1 may well be an emotional experience for you. Most people never have the occasion to call and for those that do, they will likely only call once their entire lives. Moreover, you as the caller are the one on the spot. You are there with the sick person or the hurt person, and you feel responsible to get something done and get it done quickly. Other people around are looking at you expecting you to do something.
It’s not quite the same thing for the dispatcher. I remember my very first EMS call. I was actually a police civilian employee and was directed to pick up a ringing incoming line by a very busy dispatcher. It turns out a young woman was sick and needed to get to the hospital. That was my first call; it was in 1972. I do not remember my second call, or the third one, or the 250th call, or the 2,000th call.
The first time I took a 9•1•1 call from the manager at the local landfill about an infant’s body that had come tumbling out of the garbage truck as it unloaded, I was pretty upset. I took a break, went for a walk around the building, sent a long and sincere prayer heaven’s way for that baby and the baby’s mother, and finally took a deep breath and went back to work. The second call I took from the landfill manager didn’t affect me so much. I gathered the necessary information, said a prayer for that child and his mother, took a deep breath, and went back to work. The third call I took from that manager, I collected what information I needed, said a prayer, and went right on to my next call.
That same week that I got that first call, a dead baby was found in a garbage dumpster downtown, and another infant was found crying as she lay wrapped up and lying on the pavement of an alley not even 3 blocks from police headquarters where the 9•1•1 center was located.
Your call may be an emotional experience for you; it is almost certainly not an emotional experience for the dispatcher you talk to. Our job demands that we be outwardly calm, cool, collected, and commanding in the middle of it all, no matter how we feel inside. There aren’t many calls that really catch my attention anymore. For the most part, no matter what you are calling in, I’ve already handled a call similar to it, probably more times that I care to think about.
Don’t take it personal. We’re not going to.
We’re an odd group of people. I don’t think I’ll offend any of my fellow dispatchers with that claim. We have heard or will hear about everything that’s possible to hear in the human experience. We’ve also had to come to terms with the fact that sometimes our best is not going to be good enough. Sometimes we have more patients or more fires or more calls for the police than we have people to send. In those cases, we have to decide who gets help first.
We’ve also had to come to terms with the fact that sometimes people die or just can’t put their lives back together the way it was before, and it’s going to be that way no matter what we try to do about it. Sometimes we are the last person our caller will talk to before St. Peter greets them at heaven’s door. We know they’re scared. We can hear how scared they are. We can still only do what we can do, whether that is helping a new baby into the world or instructing CPR procedures that are not going to work.

Some Other Views of the Job
Vast Police Family Tied by Radio
A reporter with the Washington Times, the other newspaper in the nation’s capital, spent some time in the D.C. police communications center. This is an excerpt from the story about one of the businest centers in the country.
Two Members of My Family Died
No dispatcher who experiences the line-of-duty death of one of the people for whom they dispatch will ever forget the moments in the communications center waiting for word about what happened and who was killed. If you’ve been there, you know what it feels like. If you haven’t, this short account written by a dispatcher with the Cobb County 9•1•1 center gives you an idea of what it’s like knowing that someone you know has been killed but you still have to answer the regular and routine calls that don’t stop just because someone you know has just died.
The Emergency Services Dispatcher
This gives an account of what we do in a way that I have always admired. I picked it up on the Internet somewhere. I’m not sure where or who wrote it.
You Might Be a Dispatcher If . . . . .
This is particularly good for you folks who have family or friends who happen to be emergency services dispatchers. It gives you an insight into how they are thinking. So check out, “You Might Be a Dispatcher If . . . . .” It appeared in Dispatch Monthly, March 1988, and some other places in modified form. This is a slightly modified version.

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