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‘Workboot’ meeting highlights inner workings of Glendale police and fire

Officials and residents can get a glimpse into how certain departments operate, with most recent event spotlighting police and fire dispatchers.

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When the dispatcher answered the phone at the Verdugo Fire Communications Center, the caller said his wife was having a baby at their Burbank home, but he didn’t know how far along she was.

Neither of them even knew she was pregnant.

Calmly, the dispatcher gave him a series of instructions: Have her lie down flat on her back, with her legs up. Take slow, deep breaths. The paramedics will arrive soon.

About a minute and a half into the phone call, the situation intensified.

“Oh my God, she is having a baby,” the husband said. “Uh, she’s — something’s coming out.”

The dispatcher guided the caller through the delivery, and after almost two minutes, an infant begins crying.

“Oh my God, we have a boy!” the father said.

Glendale fire officials played the emotional 911 call last week during the latest in a series of City Council “Workboot” meetings, which offer elected officials and residents a glimpse into the inner workings of the city. The meeting on Tuesday put the spotlight on police and fire dispatchers.

“We’ve delivered a few over the years, myself included,” Don Wise, executive administrator of the fire communications center, said after playing the baby delivery clip. “I’m sure I’m a Godfather somewhere.”

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The Verdugo center, located in Glendale’s Fire Station 21, provides fire dispatch services to 14 agencies, including Burbank and Pasadena. During fiscal year 2014-15, the facility — currently made up of 21 employees — received 157,678 phone calls, which generated 76,300 incidents, Wise said.

That’s because some incidents, such as a major brush fire, could generate hundreds of phone calls. Of those incidents, 17,288 were in Glendale.

Most fire emergency calls in Glendale, however, are routed to the facility from police dispatchers at the police station communications center about a mile away. Last year, those dispatchers handled 220,321 phone calls.

“Like a sports team, our communications center is the head coach,” said Glendale Police Chief Robert Castro, adding that if the initial calls aren’t handled properly, nothing in the field will go right.

Through Sept. 15 of this year, police dispatchers handled 11,000 more calls than during the same period last year, according to Mary Gonzalez, a communications center supervisor.

“We are experts at multi-tasking,” Gonzalez said, before playing a clip of a woman’s 911 call as someone broke into her home, where she was with her two young children. Two suspects were eventually arrested that evening after a foot pursuit through backyards in Glendale.

“We will answer the call, assess the situation, monitor the radio, enter and update calls, advise other agencies if necessary, coordinate with the fire department and often place other incoming calls on hold,” she added.

Both facilities, officials said, are adapting to the public’s increased reliance on mobile devices. According to Wise, 70% of calls to the Verdugo center come from wireless devices.

Next month, the Verdugo center will start sending incident information to an application called PulsePoint, which will notify cellphone users when someone nearby is having a cardiac emergency in a public place, as well as how to perform CPR and where they can find a publicly accessible automated external defibrillator.

“The hope is that you would do one of two things — either run to that location and help start CPR until paramedics arrive, and/or locate an automated external defibrillator,” Wise said. “There’s such a very low cardiac-survival rate right now, so we want to be able to try to increase that survival rate.”

Meanwhile, the police department is looking at the feasibility of responding to text messages sent to 911.

Last week’s “Workboot” meeting came on the heels of a similar session focused on how police officers de-escalate situations and respond when even the most routine encounters turn violent. Authorities shared three recent videos from the field.

In one, taken in August, a 35-year-old man sat shaking behind the wheel of his Hummer, repeating, quickly through short breaths, that he loved his family.

Glendale police stopped the body builder while responding to a hit-and-run incident where the driver collided with a parked car, lost a tire and continued to drive, dragging his car up the street. Authorities discovered later that he was under the influence of cocaine and PCP.

Several officers, including a sergeant recording the encounter, stood outside the driver's door, trying to calm him down while asking about his medical history.

“You're going to be OK. Breathe, buddy,” one said, before the man was asked to step out.

After the driver ignored orders to get out of the car, police went to pull him out, while patting his back. Shaking, the man punched an officer in the face. He was shot twice with a Taser before his arrest.

A supervisor recorded the incident because he felt it could be used to train officers in recognizing signs of drug impairment, but officials chose to share it with the public to highlight the patience of and precautions taken by responding officers, said Glendale Police Sgt. Robert William.

“The whole situation’s unsafe...That’s a situation where we can’t just turn around and go away,” William said. “The way the officers responded is not unique. The only thing different about it is we had video, and we thought it’d be good to highlight it.”

In Glendale, most police officers carry audio recorders on their belts to capture encounters with the public, and most police vehicles are equipped with dash cameras.

Glendale police use force in less than 0.14% of contacts, which could include arrests, citations, calls for service or field interviews, police officials said. Locally in recent years, Castro said, police have seen an uptick in gun-related arrests, while assaults on officers have gone up.

In another video, a Glendale patrol officer pulled over to stop a man, who was jaywalking while waving a knife, early one November morning last year.

As the man breached the so-called 21-foot rule — which states that someone armed with an edged weapon poses a threat from that distance because of the time it takes an officer to react — the officer fired one shot from his gun.

The man was struck in the abdomen, after which he turned around and slowly walked away, eventually sitting at a nearby bus stop.

“It took one round to stop the threat,” William said at the August meeting, adding that if the suspect had continued advancing, the officer would’ve shot him again. “The fact that the officer didn’t continue firing shows a great deal of restraint."

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Alene Tchekmedyian, alene.tchekmedyian@latimes.com

Twitter: @atchek

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