911 : Dispatch Center: A Daily Drama

It’s 7:25 on a Saturday night and Nancy Munoz is taking an emergency call from a distraught woman at a pay phone. There is screaming in the background.

“I’m at the Safeway in Vista! Battery acid just blew up in someone’s face!” the caller yells into Munoz’s ear.

Munoz quickly dispatches a sheriff’s deputy to the scene, then takes another call.

“This may not be an emergency to you, but it’s an emergency to me,” explains a woman whose terrified dog has just jumped through a plate-glass window after some firecrackers exploded across the street. She asks Munoz to send a deputy to stop the kids from lighting the explosives.

At the desk behind Munoz, Christy Guerin is busy trying to calm a worried 6-year-old girl.

“My dad said all kinds of mean things to my mom and I’m afraid,” the girl says, adding that her father is drunk and threatening to beat her mother. The bilingual child translates details for her Hispanic mother. Although the woman speaks no English, she knew enough to have her daughter dial 911.

The next call the dispatchers take may be from someone asking for the time. Or a weather report. Once, a woman called 911 because her clothes were stuck in a Laundromat dryer and she asked to have a deputy sent over to help get them out.

“We try to get those callers off as politely and quickly as possible,” Munoz says.

“People abuse 911 like crazy,” said Sgt. Roy Hood of the Sheriff’s Communication Center in Mira Mesa. On Super Bowl Sunday last January, operators were deluged with calls from people asking how to get to Jack Murphy Stadium, what time the game started and what television channel it was on. Only 42% of the calls 911 receives are legitimate, Hood said.

Being an emergency operator is a little like eavesdropping for a living. During an eight-hour shift, the operators listen to dozens of mini-dramas, ranging from the sordid to the humorous to the bizarre.

Five nights a week, Munoz talks to people who need help--people in pain, people who are a pain, people dealing with the most catastrophic events of their lives.

Yet, the soft-spoken woman said, she looks forward to work. She sits contentedly before a bank of computers in the fluorescent glare of the communications center. A former secretary, she waited two years to achieve her longtime goal of becoming a dispatcher.

‘It’s Always Different’

“I love talking to people. I always have,” she said. “When I was a secretary you sat there, you typed. Here, it’s always different. The same thing doesn’t happen each and every day.”

Kathy Wilder is grateful for that.

When she arrived at work one day last June, she couldn’t have known she would try fruitlessly to revive a drowned baby, the child of people she knew. It would be her first loss. She’d managed to save four other children by talking callers through the steps of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

Wilder tried to do the same with this boy’s 12-year-old brother. But, by the time the older boy found him, the baby had been lying at the bottom of a back-yard swimming pool for 30 minutes. Slowly, Wilder began telling the hysterical boy how to clear his brother’s throat and breath air into his lungs.

Other dispatchers gathered, listening to the drama. Meanwhile, Wilder’s husband, a deputy, dropped in unexpectedly. He stared at the address on the computer screen in front of his wife--it was the home they had sold six months before.

“That’s our house!” he gasped.

“At that point, I felt like physically stepping away from the phone. . . . I must have wanted to remove myself from the situation,” she said. “I had held that little one when they’d looked at the house a couple times.”

Paramedics pronounced the child dead before arriving at the hospital.

Wilder had nightmares about the incident. Could she have done more to save the baby? She listened to a tape of the conversation again and again.

“I remember physically losing control, but my voice never lost a beat,” she said.

‘One of the Most Stressful Jobs’

In a year, a dispatcher handles almost every type of emergency call, from reports of an attempted break-in to the shooting of an officer, said William Kahn, communications coordinator for the Sheriff’s Department.

“This is probably one of the most stressful jobs you can imagine. When you pick up the phone, you don’t know what’s going to be going on the other side,” he said.

Most of the time, dispatchers are dealing with angry, uncooperative, unfriendly people.

“That predisposes the situation to a stressful encounter,” Kahn said. Multiply that by the 150 to 200 calls a full-time 911 operator answers during an eight-hour shift.

Lately, there has been added stress. Because of understaffing, the communication center’s 58 full-time dispatchers are required to work at least four hours of overtime a week. They say they don’t mind. They look forward to those heftier paychecks. They say they enjoy the excitement so much that they ignore the stress.

Said Munoz: “Say you’re late for work, you had a fight with your husband or boyfriend and you have a few difficult calls. Then you need more breaks during your shift. You must remember you’re trying to deal with other people’s problems as well as your own.”

Dispatchers burn out easily unless they learn to separate their jobs and personal lives, she said. It’s a good advice, but advice she and other dispatchers often ignore.

‘Can Be Frustrating’

“It can be frustrating working here because a lot of times we don’t know what the end result of a call is,” she said. “If we have something really hot going, we’ll sometimes call the deputies after work to find out what happened.”

On her fourth day as a 911 operator, Michelle Begen answered just such a call. The female caller was so hysterical that the young dispatcher could barely understand her. She choked out words between screams and sobs.

“Use a calm voice and just explain that you want to help her, but you can’t understand what she’s saying,” coached Begen’s supervisor, Lorri Lesher, as she monitored the call.

Eventually, Begen learned that a man had beaten up his wife or girlfriend in the parking lot of a grocery store near the Mexican border. He then fled with her 3-month-old baby, driving north in a Chevy truck, according to witnesses. In the background, Begen could hear the mother screaming over and over: “I’m bleeding, I’m bleeding! He has my baby!”

The problem was that Begen couldn’t get the address of the store, which she needed before she could dispatch a deputy. When dispatchers answer most 911 calls, the address of the phone immediately pops up on the computer screen before them. But not all the county’s pay phones are connected to the system. It took several minutes before the caller was calm enough to give an address.

Deputies eventually arrested the man and booked him for felony child endangerment, battery and drunken driving. The baby was taken to Grossmont Hospital and later placed in protective custody.

Begen will never know any more about the case. And the call was most likely pushed from her mind within the next hour, or the next day, as she dealt with more serious emergencies.

Aglass partition separates the emergency operators from radio dispatchers, who speak directly with deputies. The dispatchers’ nasal voices sound identical, as if they took lessons from the old “Adam 12” television series.

One oft-heard voice is that of Denise Jones, the communications center “Pursuit Queen.” Jones likes nothing better than hearing the siren signaling that a deputy is in hot pursuit of a suspect.

“Some people don’t like ‘em, I guess, but I love them,” Jones said. “They’re exciting. The minute you hear ‘pursuit’ on the radio, you jump up and yell, ‘Go, go!’ Then if they catch them, it’s great!”

The deputy who begins the pursuit stays with the suspect until he’s caught, even if he travels through another agency’s jurisdiction. Jones’ longest pursuit lasted 40 minutes, while a deputy chased a suspect from Vista to Fallbrook.

But this Saturday night, Jones is plagued with parties.

“We’ve got parties all over the place in Vista,” she said, her red-lacquered nails flying over the dispatch keyboard. “Just think of all the places we can go when we get off.”

Can Tell the Mood of Deputies

Radio dispatchers such as Jones know the deputies well. “The minute they say 10-8 (meaning ‘in service’), you can tell if they’re in a bad mood, if they’re cranky, if they’re happy,” said Jones, who has never met any of the deputies she has talked with each night for two years. “They’re a good group of guys.”

But, no matter how much the dispatchers love their jobs, its takes a toll.

“People wake up at night remembering an incident,” said Kahn. “In the long haul, that’s got to wear on you.”

The Sheriff’s Department offers operators a stress-management class, but nothing beyond that.

“We have a staff chaplain, but I don’t think it’s gotten that bad yet,” Kahn said.

Even Wilder, despite her guilt about not being able to save a child, isn’t ready to quit. After all, she reminds herself, she’s saved four others.

“I have the ability to care deeply but stay in control at all times,” she said. “It’s a gift, because you can’t learn this job. Those who are the best at it know how to do it innately.”