May 13, 2004
IN
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Eureka Police Dept. dispatchers
Michelle Olson, back, and Heather Gillespie, front.
Photo by Bob Doran
by HANK
SIMS
by
HANK SIMS
I. Beaten
IT
WAS 7 P.M., THE START OF THE FRIDAY NIGHT graveyard shift. Samantha
Hart [photo at right]
hadn't been plugged into her station
for more than a couple of minutes before a button on her telephone
lit up red, followed by an insistent ring that meant someone
was calling the emergency line.
Clicking on an icon on her computer
screen, Hart picked up the line and spoke into her headset in
a calm, almost cheerful voice. It seemed a simple, humble act
of defiance directed toward violence, criminality, illness, death
-- all the forces of chaos that she would spend the next 12 hours
trying to defeat.
"Nine one one, what is
your emergency?" she said.
"I need a police officer,"
said a woman, in a voice that was trying hard to squelch its
panic. "I was just assaulted."
The woman was calling from a
pay phone just a few blocks from where Hart was sitting, in the
Sixth Street headquarters of the Eureka Police Department. She
said that she was just in her boyfriend's apartment across the
street, and he had just violently beaten her. She said she was
with her 2-year-old child. She had a hotel room tonight, but
she was afraid to go there until she was sure he was in jail.
The boyfriend knew she was calling the police. The strength began
to melt away from her voice, but she was still able to say without
screaming that she needed the police to come arrest him, now.
Almost as soon as the call began,
Hart -- still using the same tone with which she answered the
call -- periodically interrupted the woman to get the first details
she needed. What is the boyfriend's name? How long ago did the
assault take place? Where is he now? Is he armed? Are you in
a safe place?
As
she listened to the answers, Hart did several things at once.
She searched the department's database for details of past
police encounters with the man. She typed up notes on her computer
and sent them over to Liz Schallon [photo at left] ,
her co-worker for the evening. Schallon began to formulate the
EPD's response to the incident, dispatching an officer to assist
the woman and others to go after the suspect.
Then, with squad cars still
en route, the woman said that the man was leaving his apartment,
and walking -- not toward her, but away. He was getting out of
there, fleeing the scene. The woman pleaded with Hart, telling
her that if the police didn't get there soon they would miss
him.
Hart continued to question the
woman. What direction is he headed? Toward A Street. What is
he wearing? A beanie. Is he with anyone? No. Is he on drugs?
Probably.
Soon after, the police arrive
at the woman's location and she hung up. In a few minutes, Hart
issued a BOLO -- "Be On the Look-Out" -- to all the
police agencies in the area.
Less than an hour later, Officer
A. J. Bolton came through the dispatch center and confirmed that
the suspect got away. Bolton said that they had taken the woman
to a shelter. "She had bruises on her back, bruises on her
arm" he said.
But Hart didn't brood on the
fact that maybe, if she somehow could have brought forces to
bear a minute or two earlier, the woman and her child might not
have had to spend the night in fear, imagining their abuser roaming
the streets and laughing about his escape. By the time she heard
Bolton's report she had already taken nine other calls. Nine
other people needed her level head in their moment of crisis.
She had nine other problems to solve, nine chances to set things
right in the world. She couldn't waste time dissecting the first
call of the night.
II. Can you multi-task?
The city of Eureka always needs
more people like Samantha Hart. Right now, it needs four of them.
The job offers $31,000 per year to start, and it'll give on-the-job
training to any qualified taker. The challenge, for the city,
is to find the one person in thousands who has the natural talent
and disposition to be able to do it.
Hart, who goes by "Sam,"
has a lot in common with her colleagues in the Eureka dispatch
office. She comes off as professional and business-like at first,
but when you get to know her a bit (after about five minutes,
the duration of a long 911 call) she is warm and funny, a fast,
thoughtful talker with a quick smile. She's in her twenties,
like almost all Eureka dispatchers are. She's a woman, like all
11 full- and part-time Eureka dispatchers are, at the moment.
And like most of the long-term members of the office -- she's
been there two and a half years -- she says she can't imagine
doing anything else.
"I feel like I was born
to do it," Hart says. "I've tried a lot of jobs, and
this one just fits like a glove."
It may strike some as odd that
at any time, day or night, the entire emergency response system
in the greater Eureka area -- the EPD, the Eureka Fire Department,
Humboldt #1 Fire District, City Ambulance -- is directed and
moved around the city not by a seasoned, balding police captain,
but by a couple of young (sometimes very young) women. But watching
them at work, managing their double-screened computers, radios
and massive, complicated phones with the speed, fluency and preternatural
calm they bring to the work, it becomes tempting to take Hart
at her word. What Eureka is banking on, with its desperate need
for new trainees, is that there are scores of melancholy waitresses,
receptionists and other harried, low-wage workers out there who
have never had the good fortune to realize that, because they
can multi-task, they are really dispatchers.
Dee
Dee Wilson [photo at right]
, the manager of the Eureka office
and a 24-year veteran dispatcher, was lucky enough to find her
calling when she was young. She began doing the job for
the Rio Dell Police Department when she was still a junior at
Fortuna High School. "I'm sure the citizens of Rio Dell
had no idea a 16-year-old was answering the phones," she
laughs.
The city will be interviewing
people for its open dispatch positions on May 25, and Wilson
hopes to have a large pool of applicants. But she warns that
there is a rigorous procedure that the department must go through
before it makes a new hire. Applicants must pass a drug test,
and be prepared for an extensive background check. And they must
be willing to work strange hours -- dispatchers work 12-hour
shifts, and after four months everyone working days (7 a.m. to
7 p.m.) switches to nights (7 p.m. to 7 a.m.)
Rudimentary typing skills are
required, and an official job description issued by the city
says that applicants should have one to three years' experience
working a "radio, teletypewriter or other communications
equipment."
But it's clear that the really
rare qualities that the department needs are more matters of
personality than training. It doesn't take too long to see that
the successful dispatchers are the ones who think quickly and
don't shy from decisive action -- "Type A" personalities,
as one of them calls it.
"We're not getting shot
at, but we're making very critical, life-and-death decisions
about who we're going to send, and how much we're going to send,
and we have to make those decisions very quickly," Wilson
says.
The critical skill, Wilson says,
is a talent and love for multi-tasking -- a word used so often
in the office that it begins to sound like a kind of mantra.
"You have to know where
every officer is at any given moment," Hart explains. "You
have to talk on the radio. You may have to have four people on
hold, and be able to go to any of them and pick up right where
you left off. If it wasn't challenging, it wouldn't be rewarding."
Many of the Eureka dispatchers
believe that the job comes more naturally to women than to men.
Though Wilson says that she's had a few male dispatchers at various
times, and Hart points to the men currently dispatching for the
Sheriff's Office and the California Highway Patrol, they both
believe that generally, women are simply better able to do many
different things at the same time.
Some of the dispatchers take
multi-tasking to such an extent that it becomes clear that to
this crowd, it is less a talent than a lifestyle. Thirty-year-old
Liz Schallon, the woman who was working with Hart Friday night,
is an example: In addition to working full-time in the Eureka
office, she is a full-time student at Humboldt State University,
where she'll receive her bachelor's degree in early childhood
education on Saturday. She also fills in part-time at the HSU
Police's dispatch office.
Schallon -- who tried
out for the job at the suggestion of a police officer who frequented
a convenience store where she was working -- says she wanted
to get her degree for personal reasons, and she thought that
the field of study she chose may come in handy (she was married
a little less than a year ago). It's not as if she were looking
for a career change, because she has no intention of retiring
from her current work.
"We all believe that this
is our career -- it's not just a job," she says. "Not
a lot of people can do what we do. We're adrenaline junkies.
We love to work under pressure."
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While they answer the phones,
dispatchers monitor 10 channels of radio traffic from a variety
of public safety agencies.
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The
26 telephone lines, including 911, police business lines and
emergency telephones in city elevators answered by Eureka dispatchers. |
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The top half of this screen shows
all the police, fire and ambulance units that dispatchers may
deploy at any moment. Their status whether busy or idle is indicated
by color.
|
The
bottom half shows all calls for service that require attention,
along with the type of service requested and the priority of
the call. |
III. Knowing the
turf
Just a few moments after she
finished the call from the terrified woman at the pay phone,
Hart's phone lit up again. A man calling from Woodley Island
on his cell phone told her that he was looking at someone lying
in the bushes, and the guy wasn't moving. Even after he honked
his horn several times, the guy didn't stir.
Hart knew that in these types
of calls, it almost always turned out that the guy in the bushes
was just sleeping, or passed out from drink, and it went over
to Schallon as a low-priority incident. The challenge ahead of
her now was to try to get the man on the phone -- the "reporting
party," in police parlance -- to tell her precisely where
he was, so that an officer could locate him with the least amount
of difficulty.
The man could tell her what
side of the road he was on, but not much else. So Hart drew from
her memory a verbal map of the island -- where the turnoff to
the marina was, how it curved around and underneath the road,
where certain patches of foliage were located. And after she
got the reporting party to put an X to the spot, she didn't think
it strange that she was able to picture the caller's surroundings
better than he himself could.
"We're professionals,"
she said. "We're taught how to do this. [Callers] don't
go to reporting party school."
As the shift wore on, there
were a few moments of comic relief. At 8:20 p.m., a man called
the EPD non-emergency line -- one of the many phone lines besides
911 that Eureka dispatchers answer -- and asked if the department
would be conducting any sobriety checkpoints that night. Hart
said she wasn't sure.
"That's unconstitutional,
to do one and not let us know two hours before!" the caller
warned. Hart rolled her eyes and gave him a number to call tomorrow.
"How about you just don't drive drunk?" Hart asked
after the man clicked off.
At 10 p.m., an antiquated machine
off in the other side of the room suddenly jumped to life with
a piercing shriek. Schallon swore under her breath as she hustled
over to shut the thing off. The machine was the property of the
Eureka Public Works Department, and its alarm meant that a sewage
line was plugged somewhere. Hart began calling the 11 contact
numbers she had for public works employees. She worked through
the entire list over the next hour and a half, but not one of
the civil servants could be found to come fix the problem.
Despite the early flurry of
calls, it was turning out to be a relatively slow night. This
might have been due to the fact that it was the end of the month.
Most people had not yet received their paychecks -- for too many,
a fresh excuse to do something stupid. Even so, serious calls
kept pouring in at a regular pace.
A 13-year-old boy ran away from
his Henderson Center home for the second time in a few weeks.
He was gone all weekend the last time. A man wanted on a warrant
from San Bernardino County was found while he was working on
his vehicle at the Lube Rack on Fifth Street -- he struggled
with officers while he was being taken into custody. Hart and
Schallon had to call San Bernardino to see if they would agree
to transport their suspect back home, and were surprised and
pleased when their counterparts down south said that they would
-- other counties are often too cheap to pay for transportation
costs.
There were two different medical
calls that were referred by a different agency. In both cases,
friends of the patients had called the ambulance service instead
of 911. That meant that the people at the ambulance company handled
the over-the-phone triage, and Hart and Schallon were not called
upon to use their medical training, which all new hires get in
their first year on the job, to help keep the patients alive
while the ambulance made its way to their homes.
Hart and Schallon will probably
be forever unaware of the results of these calls for help, the
times beyond number that people at their most emotional reach
out to grasp at their lifeline. It is a curse of their work that
they are intensely involved in the first chapters of an endless
series of stories, and usually don't have the time or the opportunity
to find out what happened afterwards.
"That's one of the things
we complain about -- we don't get a lot of closure," Schallon
said.
The Friday graveyard shift was
not long over when, at around 1:30 p.m. the next day, EPD officers
stopped by the apartment of the domestic violence suspect who
had eluded them the night before. Perhaps he thought that he
had gotten away with it, or perhaps he realized that there was
nowhere for him to run. Whatever the case, the man was at his
apartment. The officers took him to jail.
It had taken some time, but
that particular piece of disorder from Sam Hart's -- and Eureka's
-- Friday night had been resolved, or as close to resolved as
is humanly possible.
In between answering 911 emergency calls, dispatcher Michelle
Olson
cares for an abandoned kitten brought to the Eureka Police Department.
SEE ALSO:
February
1996 feature: THE WORKING WORLD OF 911
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