This is from this thread… there seemed to be interest. So here it is.
I can’t answer for all of the country, but can give you details of how it works in my area… and I have a vague understanding of how things work across the country.
From the last thread- my first question from mhendo:
Our dispatch software, when I enter in an address, will give me a list of any incident “near by”. My responsibility, before I setup a duplicate call for the dispatcher, is to see if I’m entering in the same incident twice or adding information to an already existing incident.
This works great for city locations, for freeways, the geofile doesn’t match near by’s very well for some reason so it is harder. Although- usually the dispatcher will notify all the call takers of some sort of freeway incident so everybody knows about it.
The other issue is that a lot of people don’t really know where they are… so the same incident might be given to us as several locations that are quite a ways apart. That makes it difficult, as a dispatcher, to determine which incidents are the same and which might be something new, just relatively close.
So- the short answer to your question is this: yes, if things are working properly the dispatch software will recognize and alert us to nearby incidents. The Dispatcher will alert us to other things we may need to know. But the software isn’t flawless, especially with regards to freeways.
What percentage of calls would you say are frivolous?
Edit: Also, when you take a call, do you have any information on previous calls that have come from the same location? Ie, would you know if there is a history of violence in a house, or a known crazy person who makes false calls?
Do the 911 operators/calltakers also handle dispatch? Your OP suggests not, but it comes up every so often in my job that my transcriptionists seem to think they’re the same. It’s not something I’ve bothered to investigate until now, though.
No. We have a couple of people that are bilingual, but it’s not at all a requirement for the job. We have access to a service provided by the phone company that gives us access to interpreters for any language we need. This can take a few extra minutes- but it would be impossible to find in house interpreters for… Spanish, Russian, Mandarin, Viet Namese, etc. Which you wouldn’t think was necessary, but I’ve had to ask for languages I didn’t even know existed. (Don’t ask, I don’t remember.)
1> If by the first question you mean- calls we receive on 911 that are police matters, but not emergencies (You wake up and find your car broken into, for example). The number would be quite high. I’d put it at 15-20%, but that’s just a guess. Our Directly certainly doesn’t run those numbers by me.
If you mean people who call because Burger King won’t give them their order… it’s much much much lower. We automatically will transfer them to our non-emergency number and they will usually either go away or call on the non-emergency line. About 2 or 3 times a month, some guy gets it in their head to keep calling 911 for something or other and won’t let it go. This can either end with them finally giving up, because he keeps getting transferred to non-emergency over and over, or police come and arrest him for abuse of 911. The second doesn’t happen very often, they REALLY have to push the envelope. But, every so often. We don’t mess around with those types too much.
2> A police officer can write a special report to add “premise information” to an address. This is usually done for officer safety purposes (tenant John Smith owns a shotgun and has history of delusions. Is known to answer his door with the gun…) But it can be used for any number of purposes including- as you suggested- frequent callers, crazy people, chronic problems, locations used as drug labs. We, as dispatchers, can also add temporary premise information tags should the need arise. (Say- they want to have a call that might normally be treated as a low priority be treated as a high priority for the next day for whatever reason.)
And yes- we are required to check the Premise Information file for every call we set up and note in the call whether there is any relevant information.
Maybe I should have been clearer in my OP. I am a 911 calltaker and police and fire dispatcher. My official title is ECOII- (pronounced “echo 2”) which stands for Emergency Communications Operator II. (I understand there is some official push to change the title to remove the word “Operator” as some people don’t like the connotation.)
We do have some people in our bureau that are calltakers only. But nobody who is a dispatcher is a dispatcher only- they do both dispatch and calltake. In our agency- you only do one at a time. You are either dispatching, or you are taking calls. In some agencies, you are required to do both at the same time. Our agency is too large to be able to handle that type of setup.
Let me know if I need to clarify. In the meantime- bring it on!!!
We have software which gives us address information for all landlines. Our policy is to still verbally verify this by having you repeat it, and if there is a mistake to report it.
Cell phones, however, we are somewhat reliant on the caller knowing where they are. On newer cell phones we can run a command which, based on the lattitude and longitude can roughly estimate where the caller is calling from.
For some things its useful. (I used it tonight to find a caller who was in a single car wreck and had no idea where he was. I used the latlon command to get an approximate location, and was able to use what he was describing around him to determine his exact location.)
For other things not so much. If there is some sort of disturbance, say, in an apartment. We can probably figure out the complex, but how do we go through 200 apartments and find the one disturbance?
If there is anything that I could impart to people it would be this. Calling 911 is like real estate- it is all LOCATION LOCATION LOCATION. If I know nothing else about your emergency, if I know the location- I can at least get some sort of assistance there.
Not really. I’ll sometimes look through my calls and see if the officers noted anything. But really my job is only the first 1/2 of the emergency. The result of the emergency is the job of the responders.
The one time I did actively follow up on a call- I delivered a 3 month premature baby over the phone lines. When I left all I knew was that it was alive when transported to the hospital. I asked my supervisor to follow up and learned the baby was alive and expected to be ok.
Delivering babies in and of itself is pretty rare, maybe 3 or 4 times in a whole year. When I found it was that premature, I was sure it was going to be stillborn. I was never more surprised in my life when he said it was alive and breathing. That was a pretty intense call (I got employee of the month for it though )
However- geography of the cities I work with is covered in extensive detail in training. Demonstration of that knowledge is vital. You need to demonstrate it by being able to pass any sort of test your coach can provide; and, well, accurately doing the job which requires a good knowledge of the area.
I was going to ask if you were trained to do the medical interventions over the phone; apparently you are.
My county is so small and rural that one person does everything. It can be skull-crushing dull, or so busy that the dispatcher can’t keep up with it all.
How long is your shift? Ours go 12 hours at a time.
We have 7; one I love to death, 5 are fine, and the last one is surly, grumpy git that I have fantasies of beating with a clue X 4. He does not have a fan club anywhere among the fire, rescue, and sheriff personnel.
In most cases the person understands enough english to get the point across that they need- whatever language they need.
Not always the case- once I had no idea, it sounded like complete gibberish to me. Turns out to be the first time I’d ever heard Viet Namese. Language Line has a bit more experience, if I don’t recognize the language, and they can’t identify themselves; I will try language line and see if they can recognize it.
My job is stressful in spurts. It’s like 30 seconds of terror surrounded by hours of calm. Sometimes you can just be twiddling your thumbs while the person dispatching next to you is pulling their hair out busy. It’s just how things go. You never know when or where things are going to go south. The thing is making sure you’re always ready for whatever is going to happen.
How many calls in a day can depend greatly. To start with, my day is broken into 5 two hour periods called “shots”. I am assigned to variously dispatch or call take in the different shots. Tonight, for example, I’ve hardly taken any calls (which is why I’ve been on top of the answers so far ). But the reason for that is because I only spent 1 two hour period taking phone calls. The rest of my day has been dispatching or at a fire position we call TRO (Rhymes with joe) where you are automatically last in the call taking queue because your priority is to assist the fire dispatchers or dispatch a structure fire if one comes in.
Plus it is a Wednesday n ight. On a Friday or Saturday night… you can get a lot of calls. In the summertime, you’ll get a lot of calls regardless of what day it is. On say, 4th of July or New Years Eve- forget about it.
I worked at a call center doing hardware support for <major computer manufacturer> and then cable internet support for <cable company>. My wife worked, at the time, for the City of Portland and in the main building saw an application packet for 911 calltakers. She picked one up just on a whim and gave it to me. It seemed like a natural fit for me, or so I felt at the time. So, really in my situation, it was just happenstance.
You do get children callers. They sort of run the gamut from “Daddy is hitting Mommy” to “I’m home alone and I’m scared” or “Mommy is mean to me”.
More often than not, a child caller has no idea they dialed 911… they’re just playing with the phone and somehow got 911. (Especially common with cell phones.)
The only thing with kids, if they’re calling for an emergency, is being patient and understanding. Hopefully they know their address and if they don’t there are ways to try to get it. Kids are pretty amazing, they get scared a lot easier but sometimes are so much better at controlling their fear then adults. So while they don’t always have all the information you want- they are frequently easier to get information from.
Your second question is harder for me to answer. I’ve heard fights on the phone, but I have never heard anybody seriously injured on the phone. Domestic Violence calls are pretty common, and you get pretty numb to a lot of the “bad stuff” you deal with every day. I don’t really talk to my wife about it anymore because stuff that was tame for me made her sad. So I only talk about stuff that will make her laugh.
The other piece is that, it’s sometimes hard for me to tell which is a really bad domestic violence situation- and which is some sort of ploy/manipulation by the complainant. Not that, for purposes of my job, it matters much… I set it up as what they tell me it is, value judgements aside- but without physically hearing a physical fight over the phone- It’s hard to make that assessment. And truthfully, at times, it feels like you are ALWAYS dealing with the ploy/manipulation side of things (As my old coach put it- “Jerry Springer shit.”). But you never know what the officers will find when they arrive. I hope that answers your question- I know it I sort of danced around it a little bit.
VunderBob- We have a triage guide for medical calls that includes procedures to follow for Baby, Child and Adult CPR/Choking and Childbirth. We do get First Aid/CPR Certified- but for purposes of people calling in- if I am not giving the instructions as given on that guide I am in a heap of trouble.
There is still some quick thinking and improvising involved. On the baby I was talking about- it was through language line, the caller was a spanish speaker, and as it turned out a little ignorant of the process. So his story kept changing a little bit. It was difficult to determine if I should be giving the prearrival instructions or not- and if I was what instructions should I be giving?
Our shift is 10 hours long. (As mentioned previously- broken into 5 2 hour long chunks of time. ) This gives us a chance to do a variety of things within the day. Has everybody take some calls within the day and gives everybody a chance to dispatch. (Dispatch is considered the much more desirable position.)
How often do you get calls where the caller says nothing? What do you do? Say if I am very ill, I have the strength to press 911 and then I pass out. Will help arrive?
In our county, the dispatcher will usually send a deputy, the rescue squad, or both, depending on the vibes they get from the call. FWIW, I’m a volunteer fireman and EMT.
I’ve done a couple of these, and they had happy endings. The last one was an old lady who managed to push her medical alert pendant in her sleep. The other one was an old guy who had 911 on a soft button, and his cat did the deed.
The one time I had to call 911 was in a domestic abuse situation. My “friend” ended up pulling the receiver out of my hand and hanging up but the call did go through. It immediately rang back (Which is when he pulled the phone out of the wall…good times).
My question is, is the standard procedure when no one is on the line? To phone back the number?
Ultimately the police were disbatched but I was wondering if this was because they began getting a busy signal or if it was automatic and they call back as well?
Not trying to hijack The Tof’s thread, but I am also a 911 dispatcher/calltaker supervisor in the mid west.
So far, he has answered pretty much the same way I would except for a few things.
On the frivolous calls:
Maybe it’s regional, but we take a ton of calls that I would call frivolous. Then again, being in a 911 center for almost 15 years can make one jaded. Some of our frivolous calls include…"Traffic is backed up on XXX you need to send an officer up here to direct traffic so [I can get through!!
Or my favorite…“Yes I am sitting in the lot at the mall and there is a person in their car just sitting there, could you send an officer out to make him move so I can have his spot? I know he is just sitting there until I move along and then he will leave.” Then there are people who dial 911 for directions to the movie theaters, grocery stores, etc.
When you say calls, that can mean several things…In my center, we take about 350 calls for service in each 12 hr shift. By call for service I mean we dispatch an officer, firetruck or ambulance to it. When it comes to phone calls, the number skyrockets. We have two phone systems, one is 911 and the other is for normal calls. The last time I counted the phone calls it was an average of1,800 normal calls and 200 911 calls per 12 hour shift.
This is with 5 dispatchers working. Which are grouped into 2 call takers and 3 radio people. The 3 radio people also answer phone calls.
I know this sounds impossible, but remember some of these calls may only last a couple of seconds, expecially when talking to officers who can’t get out on their radio for some reason. They know we are busy and will keep the conversations short.
As The Tof said, the stress level at the center can go from complete boredom to all phones lit up and all the radios screaming in a heartbeat. It can stay that way for 30 seconds or 3 hours, depending on the calls coming in.
The busiest day I have had was when a severe thunderstorm rolled through the area, I dispatched 492 fire calls in 4 hours. They ranged from 1 truck to electric wires down all the way to 5 trucks for a house on fire. Luckily times like this aren’t every day.
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