There are the calls that test them.
Every dispatcher is guaranteed to receive that first call that challenges their resolve for navigating someone else’s worst imaginable day.
Dispatcher Katie Howard received one such call in her first week off training. A mother had inadvertently fell asleep on her seven-week-old baby, and the baby had died. It was one of three calls involving young children that OCSD dispatchers fielded that week.
As a mom to two young children, Howard knew calls like these would affirm her career choice or convince her to consider another path.
“Either you can handle the stress of these calls or you can’t,” said Howard, the daughter of a retired OCSD motor deputy who joined the department 14 months ago.
Radio Dispatch Supervisor Leslie Gallant, who trained Howard, has seen the stress of the job weigh heavy on new dispatchers.
“I have seen some make it all the way through training and then they get that one call and that’s it for them,” Gallant said. “Emotionally, this is a very hard job to do.”
Howard quickly learned she was cut out for handling the tough stuff.
“It made me more focused,” she said of working intense calls. “Then, at the end of the shift, I leave it all in the building.”
Dispatchers require an ability to stay calm under pressure and multitask. However, it is their passion for helping others that draws the more than 50 dispatchers and supervisors with the Orange County Sheriff’s Department to their stations every day.
“This is the way of doing the job of a first responder without being a deputy,” said Gallant, who worked as an EMT for eight years before joining the Sheriff’s Department in 1998. “We are the first voice of contact, and we want to help. We want people to know that we are here for them.”
While tough calls are a guarantee, there are also the calls in which dispatchers know, for certain, their words made a difference.
Gallant’s call came some 18 years into her career.
A distraught victim of domestic violence called from a Lake Forest hotel for help. She was crying and didn’t know what to do next.
“She had left her situation and she was so scared,” Gallant remembers.
The woman called five more times that night, unsure she had made the right decision to leave. Gallant remained the calm, assured voice keeping the victim safe from miles away.
Days later, the woman called a final time.
“She told me, ‘You saved my life when you talked to me. I had the courage to leave and move to Los Angeles’,” Gallant recalled on a recent Thursday. “That is a call I will always remember.”
Stationed at the Emergency Communications Bureau, dispatchers field about 1,500 emergent and non-emergent calls every day.
“We never know what’s on the other end of that call,” Gallant said. “We always try to remember that when someone calls, whatever the problem is, it’s an emergency to them.”
Although, Gallant admits, there are times when it really isn’t an emergency at all.
There was the time a woman called 911 to report the strong scent of sizzling onions emanating from her neighbor’s home – a call Gallant fielded herself some years ago. Or there was the time an irate woman requested a deputy to settle an argument at a fast food chain over a poorly constructed hamburger.
“We only have so many 911 lines so we don’t want non-emergent calls tying up those lines and delaying help for someone who really needs it,” Howard said.
At the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, dispatchers are broken up into two groups: those who take the calls and those who dispatch emergency services and relay information to the deputies on the radio.
After six to eight weeks training to be a call taker, a new dispatcher will spend several months fielding calls before taking up radio training. Radio training then stretches between 16 and 18 weeks.
The radio demands clear communication skills and multi-tasking mastery. The information dispatchers provide deputies in the field dictates the initial response, so every detail matters.
“We have to control the conversation,” Howard said. “We need people to be descriptive. And we need people to know that being on the phone doesn’t delay help. As we’re talking, we’re also sending deputies.”
Getting to the crux of the emergency helps dispatchers relay the most accurate information to deputies in the field, and there is little room for error.
“We re-phrase what the caller is saying to the most necessary information, and we need to be specific” Howard said. “We want to keep our deputies safe.”
When the deputies arrive on scene that’s often when the call ends for dispatch --- an abrupt finale with no satisfaction of resolution.
Are the deputies OK? Did that caller survive? Did that child start breathing? What happened?
“We never know the outcome,” Gallant said. “But you can’t dwell. We just move on to the next call.”
