Law Dispatcher

Disturbance comes in many forms.  From something as simple as the neighbor using his saw too late at night and keeping the neighbors awake to that all out knock down drag out fight between family members that may involve weapons.  These are the most dangerous calls for law enforcement to respond to simply because emotions run high between parties and the threat potential is real.  The possibility increases substantially for the use of weapons.  That is why 911 operators want you to stay on the line when you call in a disturbance.  By staying on the line, the operator can get real time information to the responding units, hopefully distract the caller away from the situation, and perhaps even dissipate the whole situation before the responder gets on scene.

Disturbance calls are very difficult for calltakers because the definition of the different types of disturbance calls are not well understood.  When I trained calltakers, I made sure they understood the difference between then all, and reassured them it was not as difficult as other trainers led them to believe.  I have to believe that a lot of the trainers themselves, do not understand the difference and thus pass on confusing teachings to their trainees.  The difference between the different types of calls is based upon the following scenarios:  relationship between the parties involved and/or the situation of the disturbance.  Please let me explain.

Family:  This is a disturbance between two or more people who at one time or another had some kind of relationship.  Father, Mother, Sister, Brother, Uncle, Aunt, Cousin, Boyfriend, Girlfriend, ex-boyfriend, ex-girlfriend, step parents and so on.  My favorite…”my baby’s daddy”.  (Really!  So you mean, your ex-boyfriend or ex- husband???  They really don’t like that when you state the obvious back to them.)  Disturbance calls are not based upon what is the cause of the disturbance.

Civil:  This is the easiest of them all.  This is a simple dispute between two parties (not related) when one of the parties is not present.  Example:  The neighbor has moved his fence over onto the callers property.  The neighbor is not around.  Very simple.  If the neighbor is present, then it falls into the next category.

Distrubance:  This is when there is some kind of disagreement between parties (not related) and both parties are present.

Juvenille:  Kids doing things they shouldn’t be doing.  Setting off fireworks or riding bikes and skate boards off of park benches etc.  There is no relation between the caller and the kids.

Noise:  Pretty self explanatory.  Someone is making excessively loud noise during a time that they shouldn’t.  (No relationship.)

Some disturbance calls receive higher priority than others.  Any disturbance where both of the warring parties are present gets a higher priority due to the potential for it to escalate.  Juvenile disturbance priorities are based upon the situation.  If it’s a disturbance that doesn’t present a threat to life or property, it will receive a lower priority.  Noise and Civil disturbance will also receive a lower priority.  DO NOT think that becuase the situation is a nuisance to you, that you can say that weapons are involved or there is a threat to life or property and they will respond quicker.  Yes, they will respond quicker, but it also means that you may be going to jail quicker too.  You are not allowed to report false claims to elevate the priority of your call for a faster response.  All 911 lines are recorded and documented with your location and telephone number and we can track you down if we need to.

If you are calling in a disturbance call, please know the following information:  Address, telephone number, who vs. who and their relationship, any weapons involved and if so what kind, any drinking or drugs involved, any restraining orders issued, any injuries, what are the names of the subjects involved?  If one or more subjects left, what were they last seen driving and what direction did they go?

Disturbance calls are probably one of the most frequent calls we get.  I generally try to keep the caller from talking to the other party if at all possible.  On the occasion, I have been able to completely eliminate the situation by ordering the calltaker to do a certain action.   Those are the best.

As I’ve stated before, kids are the best callers, however, it is heartbreaking when they call in and they are reporting their parents are at each others throats.  As a calltaker, it is those times that I wish I could reach through the phone lines and just put my arms around them and protect them from the situation.

If you are a third party to noise disturbance, please agree to meet with the officer.  It is very difficult for the officer to drive through a neighborhood and try to hear the noise that you are hearing while he has to listen to his radio traffic and his vehicle running.    If the officer has to get out of his vehicle to meet with you, he realizes that you are serious about the complaint and want it resolved promptly.  Plus, you’ve just increased his chances to hear the noise for himself by being out of his vehicle.  If you don’t meet with him, you’re probably just a whiner and you deserve to listen to the offending noise all night long.

One of the most common types of calls to a 911 center is a burglary call. Most callers will state that they have been robbed, when in fact, they have not been robbed at all, they have been burglarized. There’s a big difference. Let me explain. When the premise of a house, vehicle, or business has been broken, it is a burglary. When a purse snatcher yanks your purse off of you, that’s a robbery. A robbery must involve something being taken by force off of your person. If your wallet is laying on the seat beside you in the car, that is not a robbery because it was not on your person ie…in your pocket or in your hand.

When callers call in and state to me that they have been robbed, my usual response is “What do mean by robbed?” I’m not trying to be a smart aleck, just simply want to understand exactly what the problem is and code the call accordingly. Usually then I will advise the caller of the correct terminology and proceed with the call.

As you can see, there are three different types of burglary calls. I will deal with each one individually but in essence, they are all handled pretty much the same way.

Vehicle: When the premise of a vehicle has been broken, law enforcement will respond to lift fingerprints and take a report. Make sure that when you call in a vehicle burglary, you are available to wait for an officer to respond. (You can’t call it in and expect to go to work in the next 5 minutes.) Also, if the vehicle is wet from either rain or dew, prints will not be able to be lifted until the vehicle is dry. Try not to touch the vehicle anymore than absolutely necessary before the law arrives. Make sure you tell the calltaker exactly where the vehicle is located and that you will be standing by to meet with the officer. Now, for the difficult part of vehicle burglaries. If the vehicle is a pickup truck and someone took something from the bed of the truck, there is a varying of opinions as to weather the premise of the truck has been broken. For my own sanity’s sake and ease of calltaking, I still code it a burglary and the responding officer can change the call code if they so choose. The same goes for tires/rims being taken off of a vehicle.

House: As with vehicle burglaries, the premise of the house must be broken whether by force or not. If the subject enters the house without permission to do so, it is considered a burglary. Again, prints will be lifted and a report made. When calling your local law enforcement, make sure you know the address of the location and try not to touch anything. Be willing to stay and meet with the responding officer. The sticky point with residential burglaries is if something was taken from the carport. Since no premise was actually broken, it causes some heartburn with dispatchers. Again, I code it a residential burglary and let the office change it if they want.

Business: These follow the same suite as above. The quirks with business burglaries are vending machines, which are considered a business, and construction sites (and even these are questionable). Again, just make sure someone is there to meet with the responding officer and make a report.

Now I must issue a strong warning. If at anytime, you think someone may be in your home who is not suppose to be there, whether you are in it or not, call 911 immediately. Give clear and accurate answers. If you are not in the home or place of business, DO NOT go in. Stay away at a safe distance and give the calltaker all the information they require. If you are inside the house and think someone has broken in, if at all possible, try to leave the house if you can do so without injuring yourself. If you cannot, tell the calltaker exactly where you are in the house and stay on the line. The calltaker will be constantly relaying the information to the road units so that they are aware of your situation. Stay calm.

It is always a rush of adrenaline when a calltaker take a burglary in progress call. I’ve had them with kids, who have been home sick from school or on school break. They are the best. Kids know exactly where to hide in the house, can give fairly accurate assesments of the situation and usually are calm given the circumstance. I once had an adult who was so scared that she was nearly impossible for me to control so that I could extract information. The less information I have, the worse off the situation is going to be. Calm yourself and let the calltaker take control of the call. They will stay on the line with you until you are face to face with the officer. As a calltaker, I can’t always guarantee your safety, but your chances increase substantially if you can give me the information I need. Yes, it is a freightening situation, but as long as everyone is safe, that’s all that really matters to me.

If the incident is not in progress, use the non emergency line to report it.

Calls for people who are mentally handicap come in every so often.  Most 911 centers have their “chronics” who call repeatedly about whatever and each center has their own special way of dealing with them.  Occasionally, they are recognizable by their story but there are a few who sound perfectly legit.   Nevertheless, at some point and time, they will be labeled with the special interest person label.   NEVER should a 911 call be blown off just because the calltaker thinks the caller is a few bricks shy of a full load.   Each 911 call should be handled and dealt with appropriately.  It is not until the responding officer lets the call center know that the complainant is a nut, that the call center should react with something less of a emergency response and even then, each call should be evaluated for its validity of a real potential emergency.  At first this may be difficult for the calltaker but eventually, they will figure out what the complainants issue(s) are and adjust their response accordingly.  Case in point…

We have a certain person who was calling in up to 9 or 10 times a day stating that a certain group of people were using illegal surveillance systems on her.  She would ask that we respond to a certain address and tell them to turn down their surveillance systems.  She sounded perfectly normal in her tone of voice and could answer any questions you had with clarity of thought.  Yet, the story just smacked of wackiness.  At first, we responded to the address she asked us to go to, only to find nothing there.  I’m embarrassed to admit just how many times our officers responded to these calls before the sergeant decided the caller was a nut job and we didn’t need to go out there anymore.  Eventually, she received the “Special Interest Person” label.    Each time she called, the calltaker would still take her call but dispatch would let the sergeant drop the call without responding, thereby relieving dispatch of any liability.    Eventually (after many months of calling 911), we arrested her on abuse of the 911 system.  That was a short lived relief as she figured out the non-emergency number and called it.  It got to the point where we were able to track her down and we put her in a mental institution for a few days.  They never stay long enough at those places, and soon she was released.  To avoid being placed back in the system again, she started calling from another county on a cell phone and refusing to give us her location.    By this time, we are talking about a year or so of dealing with her.  She was eventually caught and is now housed in a facility that can give her the attention she needs.

I don’t discredit these people for who they are.  Many, like my chronic caller, have suffered some very traumatic events in their life that has caused them to go off the deep end.  After receiving a call from her one slow day, I questioned her about what she heard, why they were doing it and a little bit of her history.  The story she told me is no doubt the truth and just heart wrenching.  I’ve had confirmation of the story from other sources and they also feel for her.  It is no wonder that she is the way she is.    Of course, there are those that are wack jobs just because drugs and/or alcohol abuse has destroyed what reasoning capabilities they had.  As for them, I have no sympathy.  They did what they did and they should pay a price for their actions.

There is no special way of handleing these types of calls until an officer can respond and deal with them appropriately.  My advice would be to avoid calling 911 for these types of people unless they are endangering themselves or others.

It’s time for another one of those 911 stories.  Not all are bad and some can acutally be side-splitting funny.  One thing is for sure…people do some really dumb things.  Once you become a 911 operator, you realize that people had it right back in the olden days.  Let me explain…there were no seatbelt laws, no bicycle helmet laws, people rode in the back of pick-up trucks and there was no such things as knee pads and elbow pads for kids on skatboards.  Because these items were non-existant, accidents involving people’s stupidity led to the thinning of the idiot population.  Now, I don’t mean to be insensitive but really…you had to be tough to survive or you died.  Most people used their brain before they engaged in stupid behavior.  Now days, we’ve enacted laws, created items, and basically boxed ourselves into a “safe world” that we now share with everyone else…including the idiots.  As these idiots have propagated,  our ratio of sane to insane is very much disproportionate.  I blame a lot of this on the “higher levels” of education that we insist our children obtain,  yet, we as society have failed to teach them “common sense”.  Case in point:  My youngest child tells me that she and her father have gone out to a piece of land that they own to spend some time maintaining it.  Her father put up a swing (hanging from a tree) for them to play on.  The kids had gathered a large pile of moss and use that as a landing pad for their flying leaps off of the swing.  Sounds like fun to me.  However, when one of the three children, take his leap off and lands nicely on the moss pile, he doesn’t think about the fact that the swing is still swinging and it comes back and nails him squarely on the head.  30 years ago, we would have said something to the effect that it knocked some commonsense into him but nowdays…OH NO!  Darling little Johnny got smacked in the head by the swing who was just doing what swings do and now we must do something about that!  So the father issues a rulling that the kids must now wear a helmet when they swing.  My question is…how far are we willing to entangle ourselves up in rules and regulations just to protect the idiots???  Whatever happened to living and learning from our mistakes?  I have probably the greatest job security of anyone in the world because I know that with the idiot population growing, the 911 line is their only prayer of survival.

Now on to the story after my little rant…

We dispatch for several different agencies and as such, when we train, we train to dispatch for them all albeit they have their own little quirks.  911 dispatchers are just normal human beings that need the occasional potty or meal break and when they need a break, they need another qualified individual to come relieve them from their post as in the case that happened a while back in our center.  The relieving dispatcher take his place at the main radio of one particular agency.  He receives a transmission from a road unit doing a traffic stop.  After the appropriate information is given and recorded, the officer requests the dispatcher to make contact with the owner of the vehicle to see if they know where their vehicle is.  The dispatcher made the call to the residence and a female answers the phone verifying her identity as the wife of the registered owner.  When asked if she had a new black Lexus, she  replied no, that she did not have a Lexus and had never had a new vehicle to begin with.  This information was then relayed to the officer.  The officer proceeds to let the vehicle and it’s driver go on.  The call was cleared and eventually the original dispatcher returns from their break.  The relieving dispatcher then moves on to the next agency dispatcher to give them a break.  While he is maintaining his post, he realizes that a family disturbance call has come in.  As he voices the call over the radio, it dawns on him that it is the same address as the registered owner of the black Lexus.  Hmm.  What’s going on here?

One of the most frustrating things about being a 911 operator/dispatcher is we rarely know how the story ends and unless we make contact with the responding officer, we won’t ever find out; however, this one peaked the dispatcher’s interest and he made contact with the responder and here’s the rest of the story.

After dearest wife received the phone call from us about a new black Lexus, she informed her darling husband of what had just happened.  I can just imagine his face as she speaks.  He’s about to go blanch white.  She explains the conversation between the dispatcher and herself and now he must explain what little dirty secret he has been keeping.  You see, the new black Lexus was a lovely Christmas gift to his mistress…that the wife knew nothing about (both the car and the mistress).  Just to add company to misery…the crack addict son of the now fearing-for-his-life husband, had taken the Lexus and was going to use it as a crack rental.  An observant officer puts two and two together  and figures not all is right with a high school kid driving a new Lexus in an area that he shouldn’t be in.  And thus, you can only surmise why 911 was called for a family disturbance.

As Paul Harvey would have said, “And now you know the rest of the story.”

Be sure of this:  Your sins will find you out!

Ask anyone who serves as a road warrior what exactly are the kinds of items they find on the roadway and you are bound to hear “Everything, including the kitchen sink”.  It is incredible just how much stuff falls off of vehicles and lands in the middle of roadways.  Emergency call centers are constantly receiving calls about this.   If I had a dime for every ladder found in the roadway, I’d be a rich person.  I have to wonder where all those ladders go when they are picked up.  Ladders are not cheap and I could certainly use a few.

If you come across an item in the roadway and you feel the need to call it in, use the non-emergency line.  Tell the calltaker the exact location of the item, to include the direction of travel and what lane(s) it is in.

Trying to retrieve an item that has fallen off of your vehicle can be a deadly ordeal.  Call the local law enforcement and see if they would be willing to assist in traffic control while you retrieve your goods.  Also, if you have lost an item, do your best to forwarn drivers while remaining safe yourself.