Calm in the chaos
Law enforcement dispatchers share experiences, reflections on work behind the phone during 911 calls
Tuolumne County Sheriff’s Lead Dispatcher Amanda Hart said the first responsibility of a dispatcher responding to an emergency call was to be professional and compassionate, even when facing danger, trauma or uncertainty.
“Obviously, calls are going to affect us in different ways and, based on your own personal situation, some calls may affect you more than others, but our job is to stay calm in the chaos,” said Hart, who has been a dispatcher for 11 years at the Sheriff’s Office. “We handle the call first, and obviously we’re a really tight-knit group, so we rely on each other for support. First and foremost, my job is to take care of the public and our deputies and medics first.”
The Tuolumne County Sheriff’s Office publicly commended its staff this week during National Public Safety Telecommunicators Week, dedicated to the many dispatchers who take 911 calls and provide guidance or comfort in a range of medical or criminal situations.
“I personally love my job,” Hart said. “It’s very rewarding. Yes, it’s stressful. Yes, at times it’s hard, I guess at this point I truly couldn’t imagine doing anything else.”
The Sheriff’s Office recently shared a story of how lead dispatcher Lisa Ohler and dispatcher Vanessa Yanez provided lifesaving information late last month to a mother giving CPR to her daughter. After 10 minutes, the ambulance arrived and took the girl to the hospital.
The family responded to the Sheriff’s Office with gifts and credited the dispatchers with saving the girl’s life.
“Thank you Lisa and Vanessa for your quick thinking and flawless execution,” the Sheriff’s Office stated. “And, although you both felt as though your actions were ‘just what we do,’ you both are heroes who saved a life.”
Hart said she was not on shift at the time of the incident.
“It’s part of our job. It wouldn’t be an everyday occurrence, but some kind of life-saving situation I would be comfortable saying happens every day,” Hart said.
There are nine full-time dispatchers at the Sheriff’s Office, with one additional part-time and two current
“We undergo extensive training so we’re capable of handling the job as it’s happening. You just do your job. The dispatcher’s role, at this point, is the lifeline to the help that they need. You’re giving them the resources that they need to deal with the situation in their life at that moment as an emergency.”
— Debbie Dills, dispatcher
ly in training. Hart said the office is seeking two additional dispatchers to fill vacancies.
Hart is one of three lead dispatchers and plays a supervisory role during 12-hour shifts.
There are at least two dispatchers on the job at all times who handle ambulance, criminal, 911-emergency, business or animal control calls. Sometimes, when the dispatch office at the Sonora Police Department or the local California Highway Patrol office is closed, other emergency calls are routed through the Sheriff’s Office. Calls made to Calaveras or Stanislaus counties also are occasionally routed through the office, especially during the busy summer months.
There are various algorithms and busy call times which determine how calls are forwarded through the office, Hart said, with peak hours generally between 10 a.m. and 10 p.m.
When Hart goes into the office at the beginning of the day, she logs into a computer and will likely be debriefed on any circumstances that arose in the previous shift. Calls will come in during the course of the day with various sorts of emergencies and notifications, and the dispatchers will log the details of those calls into an internal system. Each call that goes into the dispatch office is supposed to be recorded and remains in the system for 120 days, Hart said.
Sonora Police Department records manager and dispatcher Debbie Dills told much of the same story as Hart, noting she fills vacancies in the dispatcher shifts due to current staffing issues.
“We undergo extensive training so we’re capable of handling the job as it’s happening” Dills said. “You just do your job. The dispatcher’s role, at this point, is the lifeline to the help that they need. You’re giving them the resources that they need to deal with the situation in their life at that moment as an emergency.”
The department has four full-time and one part-time dispatcher. There are vacancies for one full-time and one part-time dispatcher at this time, Dills said.
They currently have a minimum of one dispatcher per shift, but with full staffing they would optimally have two.
Each dispatcher goes through a three-week class of about 120 hours and an on-site, six-month training. They receive additional training in Emergency Medical Dispatcher (EMD), which allows dispatchers to provide medical advice to emergency callers in the crucial first minutes of an incident.
The medical can range from a heart attack to a broken bone, and dispatchers must ask the “who, what, where, when” of an incident — a basic description of what happened, if there is any suspect information and if anyone is still in danger.
The dispatchers cannot dispense medical advice, though they can provide necessary life-saving instructions while ambulances are en-route to an emergency.
The dispatchers are recertified every year for EMD.
The dispatching process — the cornerstone of the emergency notification system — has only been disrupted a few times locally, and once in March 2019 for at least 15 minutes due to a freak ice and wind storm where a torrent of emergency calls suddenly disappeared to nothing.
Many of the calls were rerouted, but it was possible that some calls went unanswered. It was determined at the time that underground cables connected to the AT&T central office on South Stewart Street were inundated by the flood and caused a service outage for a small number of Sonora customers.
About 80% of calls are now made by cell phones following the precipitous drop of wired telephone use in the past 10 years.