Ears on the Pulse of a City : Police Dispatchers Share Stress With the Officers Who Respond to Their Calls

By 8 p.m., the radio traffic is building like a drum roll at the Santa Ana Police Department’s communica tions center, from which 50 officers will be dispatched to bar brawls, a wife-beating, stabbings and other mayhem before this Friday night is over.

The growing mountain of cigarette butts in some of the dispatchers’ ashtrays marks the escalation of tension and activity.

Here, at the nerve center of a police department, the atmosphere can shift within minutes from frenetic to sublime, crazy to mundane and, occasionally, to deathly still.

A frightened woman calls on the 911 emergency line to report shots fired near her home on South Sullivan Street. Another resident phones seconds later with a similar report. Then another.

Shooting Handguns

“We have two to three males shooting handguns into the air between apartments near 804 S. Townsend,” says dispatcher Nancy Slick, releasing a foot pedal to end the radio transmission. She puffs on a cigarette, glances at a visitor and says, “This is the call (we) don’t want to see.” Slick pumps the pedal again. “We need one unit to drive through the alley on the south side . . . 10-33.” She releases the pedal. “That means no one talk on the radio; we got guys with guns. We’re totally stuck now,” she adds. “If something breaks on the other side of town, what do you do? We have 50 or 60 officers out there doing their thing without being able to talk.”

The room is hushed for several minutes. Though they are not supposed to do so, officers are steering their squad cars towards the apartment building to be near if the other officers need help, and the dispatchers know this. The officers surround the alley and manage to take the gunmen into custody without trouble.

Slick heaves a big sigh and lights up another cigarette. Another dispatcher laughs with nervous relief and says, “Hey, are we having fun yet?”

On a daily basis, Orange County law enforcement officers will tell you, dispatchers face more stressful situations than detectives and patrol officers confronted with combative drunks, family arguments, undercover drug investigations and other potentially dangerous situations.

From their glass-enclosed radio consoles, the danger is distant and vicarious. Yet the responsibility for the safety of the patrol officer and the public rests to a great extent on their ability to think clearly and respond with rapid accuracy and coolheadedness. Like officers, dispatchers must be familiar with every street, school and business in the city, and the fabric and personality of individual neighborhoods. Dispatchers also have to have common sense, know the law, and something about human nature.

The ‘Unsung Heroes’

“They’re kind of the unsung heroes,” says Orange Police Lt. Bob Krauss. “Because if they aren’t on, if they aren’t working well, no one goes anywhere . . . . They’re the internal backbone of any police department,” he says.

“I get stressed out just watching them,” remarked Cpl. Curtis (Jake) Jakobson, who supervises Santa Ana police dispatchers in a large communications center. “I couldn’t handle what they do and I don’t think most officers could either.”

Using six colorful computer screens, two dispatchers in navy blue police uniforms keep track of patrol officers and investigators on the streets of Santa Ana, a densely populated city of 27 1/2 square miles. Six people, a skeleton crew for the hours between 7 p.m. and 3 a.m., are either answering phones or working at computers. There are no dinner breaks here; a patrol officer usually brings in fast food.

Like Santa Ana, most police departments usually have a dispatcher who works exclusively at checking car license plates, registration information, possible arrest warrants and the criminal histories of those whom officers believe to be suspicious.

The swirl of activity, however, is centered on Slick and another veteran dispatcher, Candy McMahon, who divide the city and officers in half as they speak quietly into microphones suspended from headsets.

Three others take calls on the 911 emergency phone lines and briskly pass on the information by computer to the pair working the radio. With their screens showing every officer in the city either on a call or out of service, Slick and McMahon make split-second decisions on which urgent call is, well, the most urgent. Then they begin juggling.

Priority Is the ‘Hot Call’

First priority is always “hot calls,” or those involving violence, an injured person or crimes in progress. Robberies, if they have just occurred, are high priority too because by definition they involve weapons or force. While a hysterical victim of a burglary may consider it an emergency, dispatchers say, break-ins take a back seat if police business is brisk; dispatchers will take a name and address and have officers gather the information when time allows.

Along with a mastery of essential tools--the radio, phones and directory assistance guides--dispatchers must have the presence of mind to calm an irrational caller, to winnow time by asking the right questions and to ask someone with a non-emergency to phone on normal business lines if it’s a busy moment.

If there is doubt about the urgency of a call, the rule of thumb is: treat it like an emergency.

Dallas Dispatcher Fired

Last year, a Dallas fire dispatcher who refused to send an ambulance to the home of a dying woman was later fired in a widely publicized incident. The dispatcher for the Dallas equivalent of a 911 emergency system, a nurse, insisted on speaking to the 60-year-old woman, even though her stepson said she was incoherent and could not breathe. After asking why the woman was incoherent, chiding the stepson for cursing her, summoning a supervisor in on the call, again asking to speak with the stepmother, a hang-up and then a call-back from the stepson’s roommate, an ambulance was finally sent. It was too late; the woman had already died of a heart attack.

Even with modern equipment at most communications centers, the 911 emergency phone system has perhaps been the most helpful to dispatchers and other public safety workers. The system’s ability to log an emergency caller’s address and phone number has saved both time and lives. Slick says the system can work even if the caller hangs up or suddenly can’t talk. She once told a woman, beaten and harassed by her husband, simply to dial the three digits to signal trouble if he returned.

“It’s still misunderstood by the general public because they use 911 for non-emergency calls, she said. “Quite honestly, the only reason to use 911 is for a crime in progress or a life or death situation . . . . It’s fantastic though. It’s no longer like playing blind man’s bluff. You’re not just staring at a blank phone button, feeling defeated because someone’s hung up.”

In Buena Park, the story goes, a male dispatcher on duty alone was forced to urinate in a trash can because he was swamped with calls. But a dispatcher’s work is not always hectic. On a slow weeknight in Orange, where only 10 officers are on duty, the women dispatchers say they occasionally have nights when they can loom a rug, read a novel, even polish the nails on both hands. Maybe, they can even run out for a burger

At work, there are those dispatchers who chase their coffee and chain-smoked cigarettes with shots of Pepto Bismol. Many drink when they get home. Some, like a veteran Huntington Beach fire dispatcher who suffered a heart attack on the job and died earlier this month, die at an early age. A few have committed suicide.

“They say you hit your burn-out point at six years,” said CHP dispatcher Beth Amer, 27, of Woodcrest, removing her headset after completing 1,031 radio transmissions in six hours. She looked at her digital watch to check the date.

“My six years are up in May . . . I think I went to the bathroom twice today. It’s Miller (beer) time!”

Talking in Cop-Speak

The work can result in an aversion to phones and noise during their off-hours. They also find themselves unconsciously talking in cop-speak, using penal codes as adjectives in non-law enforcement situations.

“You might want to warn your readers,” said Amer, intending to interject a human element to a dispatcher’s job, “that you have to be pretty 5150 (penal code translation: crazy) before you take a job like this.” In Santa Ana, “crazy Candy” McMahon plants a gold Viking cap on her head when things get really nerve-wracking. When they need a humor break, she and her fellow dispatchers flash slides onto a wall--soothing pictures of streams, seascapes and lion cubs, and reportedly a nude Tom Selleck photo.

“We do that,” McMahon explained, “right before they throw the water on us.”

Money Not Bad

So why do scores of Orange County dispatchers submit themselves to such daily tension?

For one reason, the money is not bad. Police dispatchers in Santa Ana, a city with the county’s largest volume of violent crime, make anywhere from $1,600 to $2,200 a month.

The job requires no college degree and, at many agencies, no prior experience. Dispatchers must have no criminal record and no history of credit problems or health ailments such as high blood pressure (“we raise it enough here,” says one) or nervous disorders. Some departments require typing skills and test candidates for general knowledge and logic. In Orange, candidates are placed in real-life dispatching scenarios to gauge their capacity for working under pressure.

Dispatchers with children like the flexibility of their hours.

Vast Majority Leave

Still, only one in six dispatchers lasts beyond the first year in Santa Ana. And that’s after a vast majority of applicants have already been weeded out.

“After probation,” says Patti Cotton, a seasoned dispatcher on the graveyard shift in Santa Ana, “you’re just adequate after a year. Not good, adequate.” She tells rookie dispatchers that during their first 12 months they aren’t doing their job right if they don’t go home with a headache at the end of their shift.

“It’s kind of nice to know you can do a job that not everyone can do,” says Cotton, who worked as a receptionist at a law office “making sure my nails were done” before launching her career in dispatching 18 years ago. “Once, maybe twice in 10 years, you’ll do something that will change someone’s life.”

Gripe as they may, the fast-action, fast-talking pace is something which many dispatchers thrive on. In fact, a number of them admit they left office jobs for more excitement.

Margaret Davidson, 27, of Huntington Beach, says her new job as a CHP dispatcher is much more interesting than her former line of work, debt collecting. CHP dispatcher Rufus Harrison, 37, of Tustin, once worked as a Department of Motor Vehicles clerk but, deciding he wanted a faster pace, switched to testing student drivers seeking licenses.

“You want to talk about stress . . . burn out?” said Harrison, puffing on a cigarette. “That job was burnout.”

Now, Harrison says he sometimes feels like a “wet noodle” and drinks vodka and grapefruit juice when he gets home from work. “But when I leave work at the end of the day, I don’t take my job home with me. I leave it at the door and start over the next day . . . that’s nice.”

Sometimes, dispatchers say, people call them merely to find out what time it is, where to report an extra-terrestrial sighting, the answer to a trivia question or to ask how to cook a pot roast. And every agency has its resident crazies.

“I have a little old lady; she’s 80 years old, and her dad was a minister of one of the big churches here,” said Larry Vesco, an Orange Police Department dispatcher.

“I talk to her pretty regularly. Every time she calls she says there’s a whorehouse down the street from her and she’s getting their phone calls. And she uses language you wouldn’t believe to describe it,” said Vesco, 46.

“I didn’t start this job until I was 35, and the thing that was scary was, I knew there were bad guys out there, but I couldn’t believe the crazies. Not irrational, not stupid, just crazy . . . . They call at any time, midmorning, late night----whenever the Martians are sitting on the roof, or, like this one woman, when she finds a laser beam hooked to her left breast. I don’t mind them though. On a slow day it makes my shift go by faster,” Vesco said.

Degree in Psychology

“Whoever was on (the) Wally George (Show) that day is out to get them,” says Orange dispatcher Debby Tolan, who has also dispatched for the San Clemente Police Department and worked for two other police agencies. She has a bachelor’s degree in psychology, and “it comes in handy at this job.”

A man who calls the Orange Police Department weekly was on the phone the other night. He was demanding that officers stop helicopters that he says fly low over his neighborhood and “terrorize people.” Intermittently hostile and raging, then whimpering, the man they believe is a Vietnam veteran whispers, “Listen, they’re coming in so low, so loud,” then cries, “This is mind control; it’s scaring children; it’s scaring old people . . . this is making me so mad I could commit murder!”

Can’t Change Flight Pattern

At first, Vesco said, dispatchers believed the man was listening to tapes of the motion picture, “Apocalypse Now,” and imagining the whir of helicopters overhead. Vesco checked it out. “Helicopters are flying low over his house,” Vesco said. “They’re coming from Los Alamitos. I can’t get them to change their flight pattern. The problem, too, is most of the other dispatchers won’t talk to him. They say, ‘Larry, one of your friends is on the phone.’ You eventually give up. There’s nothing you can do no matter how much you talk to him. You can’t solve their problem.”

Among the other bizarre callers are Agent 5150, a name with which a mentally unstable woman identifies herself at the request of CHP dispatchers she calls; there is also the manic-depressive woman who, in her upswings, dresses up like Little Bo Peep and visits the Orange police station.

A Really Big Job

Late on a recent Friday night, a woman called on Santa Ana Police Department’s 911 emergency line with something less than an emergency.

“My daughter fell out of bed and she’s too heavy for me to get her back in alone. Could an officer come out to help me?,” the woman politely asked. Officers had always been so nice about doing it in the past, she added.

The city’s characteristic uproar had peaked and waned, so Slick graciously resisted asking the mother “How big is she?” and sent an officer out to the home. The policeman called back later and was greeted with giggles. He asked dispatchers to send two more officers for the task.