Diary from the Citizen Police Academy: Dispatchers

Who are the unsung heroes of police work? Dispatchers.

They’re the men and women we sometimes yell at over the phone because they put us on hold while they take a more serious emergency call. They ask detailed, seemingly endless questions while we’re on the other line panicking and cursing because an officer or fire truck hasn’t shown up yet.

And they’re so darn calm about it!

Yeah, that’s their job. Public safety dispatchers have a really, really tough job. I think all of us taking the Citizen Police Academy learned that after hearing stories from two of the ’s veteran dispatchers.

Dispatchers juggle multiple emergency and non-emergency calls, input information about the calls to the dispatch system, maintain radio communication with officers on the street, and do research for the officers all at the same time.

And they keep it up 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, often with only two dispatchers on the job at any given time.

San Leandro’s public safety dispatchers, who also transfer non-police calls to the appropriate agency (e.g. fire department, California Highway Patrol), take about 350-400 calls within a 24-hour time period, one of the dispatchers told us.

Most people can’t hack the stress of the job and the long hours trapped behind a desk. Burnout commonly happens within three to five years, they said.

“It takes a very special kind of person,” said Norma, who’s been a dispatcher for over 20 years.

Dispatchers often play a sort of counseling role for people who are hysterical, or who call with requests that are not altogether sane. Teresa, the other dispatcher who spoke with us, once took a 9-1-1 call from an elderly woman on Christmas who, clearly lonely, wanted to know what was on television.

“I was on that call for a long time,” Teresa said. “I won’t just hang up on someone.”

“Teresa is very nurturing,” Norma said, while admitting she herself wasn’t so nurturing.

Norma defended what seems to some people as a cold stance by dispatchers as necessary to get the job done efficiently. Dispatchers have to take control of the call in order to get the information they need, request the proper response, and move on to the next call, she said.

Sergeant Luis Torres played us the dispatch tapes of a particularly hairy episode several years ago when an off-duty Berkeley police officer witnessed a convenience store robbery, then followed the suspects and got shot at.

The dispatchers were juggling three calls — from the off-duty officer, the store employee, and another witness. Other calls were ringing unanswered in the background. After the suspects shot at the off-duty officer’s car, they left the car and started running in two different directions, creating four different crime scenes for police to respond to.

Who coordinates all that? It starts with the dispatchers.

If that sounds fun or, more likely, rewarding, the San Leandro Police Department is currently hiring two dispatchers.

Oh, and one thing dispatchers hate, fyi, is when there’s a police or CHP helicopter flying above and everyone in the neighborhood calls to find out what it is. “That’s why we have the CodeRed system,” they said.

The CodeRed system lets residents sign up to receive automatic messages from safety personnel when there’s a situation they need to know about. You can sign up to get the alerts on the city’s website.