Veteran Dispatcher Puts Tough Calls Behind : Betty Nulton Leaves Police Airwaves After 28 Years

‘He taught me that I was the captain’s voice and I was not to put up with any argument. And that I was not to explain anything that I did. Just order. And expect it to be obeyed.’

Betty Nulton, Retiring police dispatcher

Years ago, I was just out ridin’. A detective and I went out to lunch. We got a call on a dead body in a railroad shack just up between Broadway and Market. It was an old derelict that had crawled into it and died. This was in July. It was very hot. He’d been there a couple of weeks.

This detective and I left our Code 7, our eating place. We went over there, and we still had our french fries. And being the foxes we were, we saw this rookie cop coming up. And so both of us, we never said anything to each other, we just both automatically did it. We stood upwind and breathed through our mouths. Because it was horrendous.

And here comes this rookie, charging in there.

“Is he dead? Is he dead?”

And this detective turned to me and says, “Betty, I think he’s dead.” And I says, “Yea-ah, I think he’s dead, too.”

I don’t know how many times he threw up. I truly do not know how many times. He had the dry heaves, and he was still going. So we took him in to the captain. And we had a rusty, crusty old captain, used to keep a bottle in his drawer. So he poured him about that much in a paper cup, handed it to the kid. And (the rookie cop) said, “It was the goddamn french fries! If only they hadn’t eaten the french fries!”

And so, the next day, he came in and turned in his badge. He says, “This job is not for me.” He says, “You people are different people than I am.” He says, “I AM NOT YOUR KIND OF PEOPLE!”

But, you know, there’s a trick to it. We’d have been sick, too, if we had been standing downwind, breathing through our noses. Much less, eatin’ our french fries.

This is the summer of Maude’s rise from The Pit.

Betty Nulton (a.k.a. Maude, thanks to a dirty joke that few people still remember) is coming up for air after 28 years as a San Diego Police Department dispatcher deploying the city’s troops from a giant shoebox buried deep in the bowels of the city.

She brings with her a remarkable dossier of tales--the one about the hanging, the hot plate, the nude man in Pepper Grove. She’s got nerves of kryptonite and little time for fools. She’s got a drawer full of commendations and raunchy cartoons.

But she’s also got a two-pack-a-day cigarette habit. She’s seen a woman decapitated and children who had been beaten to death. She’s had to sit in on examinations of nameless women who had been raped. She’s buried four close friends--officers killed on the job.

Says It Changed Her

“It made me very cynical. Hard, cautious,” Nulton said last week, eyes glimmering in a broad, angular face. “Gave me a hiatal hernia and migraine headaches. Lots of other little physical things that I’ll have the rest of my life. It made me a different person.”

Nulton is retiring this summer with an impressive record: No officer killed on her watch in 28 years. She says she cannot remember an officer receiving even a serious injury on her radio frequency--a yardstick by which a dispatcher might measure success.

Among police-radio devotees, Nulton’s signature is her voice--”a cross between a little vodka and yelling at baseball games,” as one officer put it. She is known citywide for her deep, throaty, police-radio banter and a seemingly imperturbable verbal calm.

“It’s like sitting on a dynamite keg,” Nulton, 55, said of the job. “All the time. And wondering if the fuse is lit. Even when you’re not in a stressful situation, you’re under stress. Because it only takes a second for an officer to be killed.”

I recall one time many, many years ago, I had a young officer, no longer with us. He had wandered out into what was then the boonies--the eastern end of Mission Valley. There was nothing there. He stopped his car to do a field interrogation of a man standing alone. Suddenly the man was crouched in a firing position, and he realized he had a gun in his hand.

The kid came onto me. He said, “I have a man pointing a gun at me.”

I said, “Well, where are you?”

He said, “I don’t know.”

I said, “Well, how far away is this man?”

“A matter of a few yards.”

“Where are you, exactly?”

He said, “Behind the door of the car.”

“Is the outside speaker on? Can he hear me?”

“Yes.”

I said, “All right. Kill him.”

And as soon as the man heard a calm woman’s voice saying, “Kill him,” he knew I meant business, and he went like a jackrabbit!

Nulton first tried her hand at dispatching in the Department of Public Works, deploying water and sewer trucks to put her husband through college. She had majored in sociology in college herself. She had taught third grade for a year but couldn’t stand it.

A full-time job with the Police Department opened up. So, at 27, she moved over to the police communications center, then at 801 Market St. She received two days’ training from the officer who had started the police radio in the early 1930s.

“He taught me that I was the captain’s voice and I was not to put up with any argument,” she remembered. “And that I was not to explain anything that I did. Just order. And expect it to be obeyed.”

These days, each dispatcher handles one of six zones of the city. Each has her own radio frequency and as many as 40 officers to deploy. On a single day, 4,000 calls pour into the communications center. As many as 40% might require a dispatch.

It Can Be a High Art

The dispatchers (mostly women) sit at computer terminals and radios, playing them like a set of drums. Reports of crimes pop incessantly onto the screens from police telephone operators. They consider their priority, assess their forces and decide whether to dispatch.

Doing it well, and with style, can be high art.

“Betty Nulton could run a field robbery and a hot pursuit at the same time,” Lt. Chuck Ellis said, with admiration. “And at the same time, be reading a book.”

A few principles gleaned from her 28 years:

- The safety of the officer is No. 1. You are his only link to help.

- If you don’t make the right decision, it could be somebody’s life.

- Property can be replaced. People cannot.

- Frightened people make mistakes.

- There are many, many ways to screw up.

We had a gal when I first started. I was practically new and her husband was an officer. (I was married to an officer, too, not at that time, but later.) But anyhow, her husband’s in an alley with a man with a knife. And this was when we only had the one frequency.

And she freezes with the key open. I mean, she just sat there with her finger on the key, frozen. I got up and hit her in the head to knock her off the key so I could get him some help.

You just have to be completely cold. You have to get the work done. You have to put your feelings aside, completely. . . . And you can fall apart next week, or there’ll be time for that tomorrow. You just don’t, you don’t fall apart at that time.

Nulton says she liked to bid for the second watch. That’s 3 p.m. to 11 p.m., the busiest shift. That’s when you have many of your robberies, your burglaries, your assaults. “Just as a general rule, most major crimes occur after it gets dark,” she points out.

For a long time she worked Logan Heights and Encanto, “because that’s where the action used to be.” Later, she worked for many years dispatching officers in East San Diego. It’s a big area and she liked the officers.

Through some odd quirk of fate, she was off duty during the initial stages of two of the biggest disasters in recent San Diego history. She didn’t work the 1984 massacre at the McDonald’s restaurant in San Ysidro. She was at the dentist during the 1978 PSA crash.

But Betty Nulton has seen plenty of horror.

Horror Stories

She remembers the night--was it Halloween?--with 19 robberies. She remembers the new recruits who wanted to check out the suicide hanging. She remembers the retarded woman who had lain on a hot plate and been cooked clean through to her ribs.

There were nights in the old days, when no women officers were working, when the doctor would come in late to examine a rape victim. A woman had to be present at all times; so dispatchers were required to attend.

Nulton says she remembers, especially, children. Like the small boy in the police lab, beaten to death by his mother. She remembers the welts, like zebra stripes, across his body. The weapon had been a garden hose.

“It tears your heart out,” she said. “Really tears you to pieces.”

“I tell you, police people live differently than other people. They truly do,” Nulton said. “ . . . They don’t see the same things that other people see. They see accidents where babies are torn to pieces.”

Nulton is an unreconstructed reader. She shares her house at the beach with a bassett, a beagle, a cat and her books. Hard-cover books line the walls of every room but the bathroom. They tend to follow a certain theme:

“Madness and mayhem--that sort of garbage.”

There are the stories of Son of Sam, the Boston Strangler, the Hillside Strangler and Thomas Noguchi, “coroner to the stars.” There’s “The Yale Murder,” “The Mafia Murders,” the Jean Harris story, “Looking for Mr. Goodbar” and Vincent Bugliosi’s “Till Death Do Us Part.”

“This one I’ve read a couple times,” she told a visitor. “It’s very good, if you’ve never read it. . . . It’s the true story of the Amityville murders, that prompted the writing of ‘The Amityville Horror.’ The true story of the murders that actually took place!

“Fiction doesn’t ring as true to me as something that really happened,” Nulton said. “It’s much more interesting when you remember when it really happened. . . . And, of course, as you can see, I’m a pretty big Stephen King fan. He gets a little gory for me sometimes.”

Nulton says she is not sorry to be retiring. (She’s on vacation for the summer and steps down officially Sept. 1.) She has an old police radio in a closet in the back of her house. But she has no intention of dusting it off now.

In her tenure, she watched the corps of half a dozen dispatchers balloon to 40. The number of frequencies went from one to six. A single dispatcher can now be responsible for several dozen officers on her frequency. All of them could conceivably talk at once.

The communications center has moved to the giant basement of the city operations building--a windowless box where teams of dispatchers handle police, fire and 911 calls. The affectionate name for the place is The Pit. There are other names.

Turnover Is High

The computers are a source of some irritation. (The idea has occurred to Nulton to “shut Motorola’s head in the door.”) On the radio, there’s atmospheric interference, frequency interference, location interference. Sometimes the Fire Department comes on loud and clear.

Turnover is high among the dispatchers. There is less of the camaraderie with the officers that existed in the old days. And four years ago, the department banned cigarette smoking in the center. “That was traumatic,” Nulton recalled.

“If you’d told me (28 years ago) that I’d have made it to retirement, I’d have laughed at you,” Nulton said. “But I don’t know. First thing you know . . . When we moved down in that hole away from 801 West Market, I was already trapped.”

But a funny thing has been happening to Betty Nulton recently, now that she is free to do as she likes. A nocturnal creature, she is suddenly waking up at 6 a.m. She puts a pillow over her head but she can’t go back to sleep.

“And every night, about 11:30 is about as long as I can make it!” she said, baffled. “I don’t know why. I’m hoping this is a phase and it will pass. Because I’m a night person. I don’t like to get up early in the morning. Nothing’s happening!”