When You Call for Help, Too Few Dispatchers to Answer

When you need the police, your call goes to the dispatch center. The same group handles both 9-1-1 and non-emergency calls to 777-3333. But for three years the city council imposed a hiring freeze on dispatchers along with the rest of the police department. In the Spring of 2005 department staff tried to start a new hiring list, but someone "up above" stopped it.

Here's what one dispatcher, speaking as a citizen, reported to a message board in June 2005:

"We are severely understaffed in all areas of the department, and the Communications Division is no exception. When the weekend hits and sideshow starts up, we have to open up another channel dedicated solely to the units on the sideshow detail. That takes a dispatcher off the phones when we already don't have enough to handle the call volume.

"Many of us get mandatoried to work overtime several times a week. There have been nights when only three or four people are answering phones and the phones just do not stop ringing. I personally was working one night when only three dispatchers were taking calls and at one point we had 11 9-1-1 calls waiting to be answered, as well as numerous seven-digit emergency line calls and non-emergency line calls. So if a citizen is calling for police service, he or she may not be able to get through for several minutes.

"This should be considered an emergency issue, along with many other issues in the department that are already considered high priority. The problem is, once you have so many issues that rate immediate response, how do you prioritize the priorities?

"The bottom line is that until we are able to hire more officers and dispatchers and other essential personnel (technicians,etc), we are barely keeping our heads above water. (But, believe me when I tell you, the employees of this department work harder than most on a slow day. And we have few, if any slow days in this city. Most of our officers/dispatchers put everything they can into their jobs, and then some!) We need more resources..."

We need more resources – in four words this dispatcher cuts through so much evasive garbage that we hear from councilmembers. The city budget authorizes 73 dispatchers, but as of June 8, 2005, only 62 were working and three were in training. You have just read a dispatcher's statement of what this understaffing means. Some day someone will die because a call simply was not answered.