In Emergencies, Operators’ Jobs Are on the Line

It was the Cat Lady again.

The night before, the amiable, elderly caller had rung up the Los Angeles Police Department’s 911 emergency command center five times. Monday morning, she called the Police Department twice more, as she has done almost daily for 18 years, to ramble on about her “kittens.”

“Those cats sure do get around,” sighed Lisa Turner, a police operator, before gently persuading the woman to hang up. Like dozens of colleagues who work around the clock in the department’s subterranean communications center, Turner has come to know the Cat Lady by voice.

Such is life at the communications center, where mundane and emergency calls pour in every hour at an unpredictable pace. Five to seven thousand calls a day funnel into a system dependent on the wits of 425 civilian and uniformed employees and a computer system that functioned efficiently for five years until a massive malfunction Saturday briefly crippled its operations.

Stationed in a room the size of a high school auditorium four floors beneath the City Hall East building, the operators are linked electronically to a Los Angeles they can only imagine. When they get calls from the Cat Lady, or another woman they call the “Laser Lady”--who regularly asks the operators to shield her brain from an unseen laser beam--the city seems a place filled with benign humor and an unending population of oddballs.

But just as quickly, the emergency calls come and the city becomes a threatening place where bodies are found in alleys and shabby apartments, burglaries seem endless, latchkey children interpret every noise as an intruder and lonely inhabitants call to ease their isolation.

‘How Scary It Sounds’

“It gets to you sometimes, how scary it sounds out there,” said Brenda Hickie, an eight-year LAPD communications veteran. “But everybody around here would help you out in a second. We’re a pretty tight group.”

Plugged into the city through headsets, the operators work at computer terminals that immediately log the incoming calls as they are received, marking the time of the calls and the locations where the callers live. Automatic screening by Pacific Bell makes sure that only calls within the city of Los Angeles are routed to the communications center. Emergency fire calls that come in via the 911 system are immediately transferred to the city Fire Department’s own dispatch system by the press of a button. Callers from other communities are routed to their respective law enforcement agencies by Pacific Bell.

‘Secondary System’

If the calls are non-emergencies, they are shunted to a “secondary system” where they are handled at a more leisurely pace. If they are emergencies, the calls are routed directly by phone or computer to the police officers nearest to the caller.

“Our philosophy is: When in doubt, send a unit,” said LAPD Capt. Forrest G. Lewallen, commander of the communications center. “They may turn out to be bad calls, but we’d rather err on the side of caution than miss a call we should have handled.”

Even when they are taking no chances, police can only respond to calls that they assume are emergencies. Department officials estimate that 20% to 25% of the calls that come in each day to the communications center turn out to be actual emergencies. The rest range from crank calls to complaints about a lesser variety of criminal activity--burglaries, stolen cars, loud parties--that is troublesome but does not require immediate police response.

Soar on Weekend Nights

Though emergencies occur at any time, the volume of calls rises with regularity during certain periods. The calls soar on weekend nights, peaking just after “the bars close,” Lewallen said. The levels also rise around Christmas, when family spats accelerate the number of disturbance calls. Events that heighten public fears, such as the Night Stalker killings and recent earthquake activity, also lead to an inevitable flood of calls.

Lewallen said he sees little difference in the performance between his civilian staff and uniformed operators. Alluding to a recent controversy over the actions of a deputy sheriff who hung up on a caller who was trying to report a murder, Lewallen said that constant training and stress management is designed to prevent such episodes.

Phone Etiquette

The long-suffering operators are taught phone etiquette and told how to deal with too much stress. They are given the essentials of the Criminal Code--instruction that helps them separate a robbery-in-progress from a burglary already committed, variations that might mean the difference between an immediate police response and a written report.

Shortly after 10 a.m. Monday morning, Brenda Hickie answered a call from a man who had entered an apartment in the 9800 block of Deering Street to find a friend’s bed covered with dry blood. The caller told Hickie that his friend had been despondent since his car was stolen and had been muttering about suicide.

“Do you know how he killed himself?” Hickie asked the caller, who was losing his composure.

The man did not want to return to the bedroom to answer her question. “Do I have to look at him?” he asked Hickie.

“No,” she replied. “We’ll call the paramedic.”

There are moments, police operators say, when they feel that their jobs are worth all the citizen complaints and junk calls. “When you can keep someone who’s suicidal on the line until a paramedic gets there, it makes you realize you’re not wasting your time,” Hickie said.