What’s the emergency?

Chief acts to promote dispatcher professionalism

From time to time, we’ve leapt at the opportunity to praise emergency dispatchers, the trained folks who answer the call to 911 or other emergency phone numbers across the country. Every April, there’s a designated National Public Safety Telecommunicators Week designed to remind Americans that behind every effective firefighter, paramedic,

EMT, police officer or sheriff’s deputy is a collection of dispatch- ers serving as vital conduits between those on the line in need and those who have devoted their lives to responding.

Emergency service dispatchers are a critical link in a communication chain that ensures a timely and professional response when something’s gone wrong or someone is in need. It is a sometimes intense job — too intense for many of us to even consider. We remain thankful to those who, day in and day out, perform the job in ways that help their neighbors and, literally, save lives.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics tells us there are around 100,000 police, fire and ambulance dispatchers in the United States working shifts around the clock to keep their communities safe. With a trained force that size, there’s bound to be an occasional mistake or lapse in judgment. When it happens, it doesn’t diminish the outstanding efforts of most dispatchers, but it demands attention because the job they do is so important.

In Fort Smith, Police Chief Danny Baker had the unenviable task of reviewing an investigation into a social media post alleging offensive and inappropriate language by one of his agency’s 911 dispatchers. After all that, Baker fired the dispatcher.

Any decision can draw criticism, whether it’s the chief’s call of letting the dispatcher go or the dispatcher’s choice to loudly use explicit, lewd language in describing someone while a colleague was attempting to help a caller. Yes, the caller couldn’t help but hear the commotion and the over-the-top foul language. In a family newspaper, we can just say it was explicit, but the language went well beyond the pale of most anyone’s standards for professional conduct in a public setting.

Even worse, it was the kind of outburst that distracted others from their jobs.

Callers have to be able to trust, immediately, in the people who answer the phones in times of crisis, and that trust can, immediately, be broken if dispatchers aren’t the calm, cool and collected types who excel in the midst of chaos.

It’s unfortunate such an unnecessary outburst would impact the dispatcher’s future and livelihood. But such behaviors cannot be accepted in a profession that sets the tone for what citizens can expect from their public servants.