quote:

She was sentenced to 10 days in jail and 18 months probation.

So she got 10 days to be contemplating the "if's"

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Ain't nobody got time for this. For real.

I guess dispatchers don't have any elocution, and enunciation requirements before getting hired...

Being a self-described, self-appointed, and self-annointed expert on this matter, I will offer the following helpful hints....


-When you call 911, know where you are. It ain't like the movies, we don't get pin point accuracy from your cell phone. We do better with land lines, but there are fewer and fewer of them these days and it is still some data entry dude putting the info in the ANI/ALI database. Sometimes there are errors, that is why we ask.

-It'll be easier for everyone if you just answer our silly questions the best you can. If you don't know, it is ok to say so. We have to ask, yes there is a reason. Us asking them doesn't delay response. We aren't the ones coming, we sit in our comfortable comm center and relay the info to the Heroes who are headed your way. Us having to explain why we ask the silly questions probably will cause a delay though because the Heroes won't have the information needed to perform their heroics.

-It's ok to call about speeding, we will most likely take the info and broadcast it to officers in the area. Don't expect to have four cops start a search grid with air support overwatch for the guy though. No, we don't want you to follow him giving turn by turn updates while trying to vector an intercept. We do care, but we have to care about things within a well-defined system of priorities. Like most information, to be good it needs to be timely. Don't call us at 0900 when you get to work to complain about the guy all by himself in his Expedition who zipped down the car-pool lane freeway on-ramp at 0700. For traffic infractions an Officer has to actually see it and while we do enjoying sending them to many locations, one place we can't send them is through a time portal to the past.

-It is not ok to call us if your child is misbehaving or refusing to eat their vegetables or go to bed. No, "scaring" kids so they behave is not a service the Heroes we dispatch provide. Now if your child's head is rotating through a full 360 degrees, they are vomiting, hovering, and speaking ancient languages *OR* are drunk, high, or physically assaulting you nor another, then YES do call us about their behavior. That is different.

-If you want to call 911 because you think it was an earthquake, yes it was an earthquake and no, we don't know if there will be another one. Your power company gets paid to provide you power, if you have paid them and have no power, call them not 911, we can't help you. Now if that lack of power causes a medical emergency due to required equipment requiring electricity, than by all means call us. You still won't get electricity but a Hero will be dispatched to get you to where electricity is available.

-Call Receivers and Dispatchers should almost never hang up on you. It is only in the rarest of occasions (drunk, belligerent, mental, etc) where that could be considered acceptable and only after significant time is spent confirming you don't have a legitimate police/fire/medical concern. Even then a good one will not simply hang up, they will explain that they can't do anything more for you, apologize, and then explain they need to go help other callers before disconnecting the line. In this case, they really didn't "hang up" on you, they simply finished their portion of the conversation prior to you finishing yours.

-I on the other hand, CAN hang up on you, and this is most likely to happen after you have been disrespectful or abusive to my Call Receivers or Dispatchers when they have tried to help you but you are unable or unwilling to listen and follow simple directions. Yes, you do pay our salaries and for that we are grateful. However the small fraction that you contribute doesn't buy you the right to treat these folks like sub-human chattel or your personal whipping post. If it gets to the point you talk to me and I hang up on you, don't bother trying to call back thinking you will get someone else to try again with. You have been flagged and each and every call you make will be auto-routed to me and you will be repeatedly "hipped to the click". I can assure your your complaint on me will be graciously accepted by the IIU folks (M-F regular daytime hours), investigated thoroughly, and once the recorded conversations are reviewed, I will be exonerated once again as I have been scores of times before over the three decades I've been doing this.



A lot of folks may not realize that in many parts of this country 911 Call Receiver/Dispatch is a minimum wage job. For the same money burger flippers and Slurpee slingers get we get the stress of making life or death decisions, being a spectator in horrific events, as well as all the wonders of shift work, alternating schedules, working holidays, mandated OT, and more.

My center currently has 18 vacancies out of a complement of 62 positions. We work a standard 8-hour day, 5-day work week yet most of my folks are averaging 52-56 hours a week and have been for the past 18 months. It is generally a thankless job and we seem to be invisible to most.

After a recent massive public awareness campaign (#IAm911) and lobbying of the feds by both of our professional organizations (APCO and NENA) we have once again been labeled as simply "Clerical" workers instead of "Public Safety". We are most definitely "First Responders" the first to answer a call for help and the lifeline for the caller to get them the help they need as well as the lifeline to the Heroes to give them the support they need to get safely home at the end of the shift yet very few agencies or entities will acknowledge that.


Sorry for the long winded diatribe but when the profession is not recognized as such, offers poor compensation, even worse working conditions, and is seen as something a trained monkey can do, it is difficult to attract and retain quality people.


Person had no business doing the job, should have been canned much earlier but I would be willing to bet a jelly donut that comm center has many of the same problems and is being pressured to retain employees in the face of shortages and out of control overtime. Not that any of that excuses the shit she pulled, but she is likely just as much a symptom of the systemic problems as she is individually responsible for her inexcusable behavior.

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Originally posted by 911Boss:

Well said. Thank you for typing all that out.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: parabellum,

I'm glad that she's getting any jail time at all. It would not have surprised me in the least if this sack of shit had gotten probation only.

Ten days in jail is ten days more than this woman thought she would ever have to serve for her actions. And 18 months probation is 18 months longer than she thought whe would have to do.

Yes, I'd like to see her locked up for, oh, about five years, but I'm not complaining about her sentence. Quite the opposite.

Great post 911boss. I worked at 911 for a few years in college and it was hands down the most thankless and underappreciated job I have ever had in my life. This story and the story about the kid who died in the van should really wake people up and make them appreciate the good 911 employees, but it won't. No one cares until someone dies (and even then they only care for about a day or two).

And para is right, anything is better than nothing, which is what she would have gotten in Baltimore. I used to transfer people to Baltimore City 911 all the time and hear them hang up on people. People would also call us (the county) because the city would either hang up on them or not even answer their call.

It's really sad the profession isn't better funded, trained, staffed, and respected.

Boss has it right. Our dispatchers are awesome. You even know who they are, because it seems like I only ever hear the same ones, and it feels like she never leaves, even when I'm on OT. Tell me that they dont do a needed service for us, and i'll point out that if you dont answer your check, your getting about every 10 seconds a call going out asking. By the third call out, units are responding to you.


I doubt this one ever even bothered to do unit checks.

I read it as they were a call-taker, and if they do it like we do call-takers never get on the radio. Probably a good thing in this case.

Airman Jeff just brought up an interesting (to me) story about the local (again to me) kid that somehow got himself stuck under a seat. So he was slowly dying and decided to make a 911 call to have someone extract him. It dispatched two local officers to try to locate the van. Then before dying he called again. That one was pretty much dismissed as a crank call since the first officers didn't find a van in an empty parking lot. Then a county car tried to find the kid, again with some interaction with the city car. Turns out there were 3 lots, all empty. Who knows if the cops were looking really hard or not.

Getting no contact with his kid, the father went to the school and found the van with little trouble. Figures, he knows what his van looked like and there were no others parked around it.

So the dispatcher said they couldn't understand what the dying kid was saying or couldn't hear him. Everyone's ass is now on the line. Worse, the "investigators" are the disfunctional city council members. Most black, almost all democrats who can't even get along with each other.

The 911 center or centers have taken a lot of grief over the years. Probably a bunch of it justified. Just pointing out how bad they are doesn't get the problem solved. It seems to take a 16 year old dying to even get a real look. One is to merge the city with the county so the city doesn't get to impose a political solution to a real problem. I have no way of knowing if the county system is better or worse, or just has a different set of problems.

I don't have a lot of experience calling 911. Only a few times per decade at best. My impression seems to be they are uninvolved and don't really give a shit. The 911 call taker seems to be filling out a form demanding all kinds of answers I don't have or care about. The emergency is some fool out front trying to die after hitting a pole or wall. Information about me gives her nothing except to waste time. She should still know from my opening my address and my caller ID. Its not really my emergency (thank God), but to the fool out in the road leaking its a matter of life or death (his). Personal information about me is of no value at all to anyone except me.

The important thing is an auto accident out on the road with what appears to be personal injuries. It really shouldn't be hard for the cops to find since the road is blocked. There aren't other roads going out this way. The other important part is there seems to be injuries. NO, I'm not getting dressed to go look. After a minute of interrogation, I'm ready to hang up on her. Maybe she's dispatched and I have no way of knowing. A couple of times I've felt like saying "Look lady, if you don't want to take the information, don't". I called as a kind of public service. More for the guy trying to die than anything else. The bored attitude I get from my end almost makes me sorry I bothered to call. Besides, other folks might have called. The important thing is they get a cop on the way (for traffic control if they don't care about the bloody guy). It takes about as long to explain it here as it takes to do the stuff.

Often we don't do the job so we don't appreciate the other guys problems. I don't appreciate their problem because I'm just making a phone call. If the dispatcher needs to know what I had for dinner, then they have a management problem. Getting politicians involved usually doesn't solve much except maybe getting themselves reelected or their relatives a job.

Paying them 3 times as much doesn't instantly make them worth that much. It just makes them unionize to demand more and make the lousy ones harder to fire.

If you think jailing a call center employee will make the problem go away, think again. Its like beating the rented mule who's already exhausted. And it will make it harder to recruit replacements. We're all cheering because we think the bitch needed jail time. What the applicants may hear is that if you screw up just one time, you'll go to jail. Easier to just say "you want fries with that". As always, there are two sides to every story.

I have known a few 911 operators. Most recognize that is a high stress low pay job. Child welfare workers fall in the same category. It is a matter of adequate screening for these positions, not money. The individual here is clearly a nonempathic individual who also has a poor command of the English language. Training would not help someone like this.

Rburg, some agencies use a program that gives them the questions to ask. We use one for medical, but there are agencies that use the fire and police programs as well. The police program in particular is tedious to use, and in my opinion asks lots of questions that are unnecessary.

HOWEVER, if the call taker does not ask each and every question, their quality score gets hit and they could face disciplinary action for deviating from the script.

Also, if they sound disengaged, they're most likely not. Most veterans that I know can take a heart attack call or a shooting call and not get excited. Once the call is over, it's time to show emotion, not during the call. We have to be the calming voice behind the mic and on the other end of the phone. It's our job.

Please don’t mistake directed questions and a matter of fact manner as “rude” or “disinterested” when calling 911. We are trained to get specific information in a particular order. Keeping a calm, level tone helps to calm callers who are understandably upset in stressful situations. We generally answer all calls in a consistent matter, using same methods even with a calm and responsive caller.


As Todd said above, does no good to have two amped up freaked out people on the phone. One is more than enough. Also as Rburg said, callers generally don’t do this very often whereas we take 50-150 calls a day. Ain’t our first rodeo as they say.

We don’t expect you to understand how or why we do what we do, shit we may not even know ourselves on some of the finer points. What we do know is that was what we were taught and trained to do and if we don’t do it then the rent might not get paid next month.

Rest assured though that an army of administrators, lawyers, judges, politicians, plaintiffs, defendants, and case law have determined the reason and need for every question asked beyond “what” and “where”.



Asking questions doesn’t slow anything down, information is being entered and updated during the interview. They aren’t waiting til the end of the call to hit “send”. On a high priority call such as an injury accident, call answer time to event entry time is generally going to be about 90 seconds or less. We can’t assume the caller does or doesn’t know info and only ask the questions we think they know the answer to. As I said earlier, if you don’t know, simply say so and we’ll move on.

Personal examples (my center, not me...) of why we ask silly questions such an actual address:

911 Ani/Ali (automatic number identification/automatic location identification) isn’t always right. VoIP (voice over internet) makes it really fun. We had a call for a serious accident, caller spoke perfect English and provided an address that would work for our area. Ani/Ali info had their name and a “local” address. Three cops were there inside of five minutes and found nothing. Another 5 minutes go by confirming address, trying for directions, is there a business for reference, etc. and none of what they are saying makes sense. 10 min into the call the genius caller advises they are in some town in England when the befuddled call receiver asks what city they are in. Turns out American serviceman and family stationed overseas took their VoIP box to make “free” phone calls. They had clue how the stuff worked.


“By the Starbucks on 132” may seem perfectly reasonable to the average caller. We have the following possibilities in our area:

N 132nd ST, NE 132nd ST, NE 132nd PL, 132nd AVE NE, 132nd AVE SE, 132nd PL NE, 132nd PL SE - most of these roads go miles and may have multiple Starbucks on them (it is Seattle area after all) so while the caller thinks they are being helpful and specific, they really are not.

“At the intersection of 14th NE and 15th NE” good, except they intersect in two different locations.

And my personal favorite, another VoIP problem, the local bank who used internet phone and a single main number for multiple branches shared across their computers network. Teller called to report a robbery, Call Receiver assumed the Ani/Ali info correct and sent every on duty cop in the city (smaller city, 8 cops on duty) to the bank where absolutely nothing was going on. Caller said no cops there, start double checking things and OOPS! We went to the “wrong” branch. It was the “other” one on the complete opposite end of the city, 6 miles away. All the cops then had to haul ass over to that one, and while doing so one of the cops clipped a pregnant woman in a cross walk. Thankfully she only had minor injuries but it was a bit of a fiasco that was completely avoidable and caused at least a 10 minute delay in response to a bank robbery.



We ask for callers information because they may be witnesses, may need to be called back, officers might want to talk to them, etc. If you don’t want to provide it fine, simply say you wish to remain anonymous.



It helps to send the right help if some specifics are known.

“I heard a crash, therefore there is a car accident, send help”


How many cars? - I don’t know I only heard it.

What did it hit it? - I don’t know I only heard it

Is anyone injured? - I don’t know I only heard it

Can you look outside? Do you see anything? - Listen lady, I ain’t going to do your job for you, are going to send someone or not? Just get out here and stop asking these stupid questions!



Supposed crash right in front of the callers house, turns out a tree limb came down and landed on his car. Ha ha stupid, your problem, not ours.

Asking someone to look out a window to maybe glean just a little more information is not the same as expecting them to extract and triage victims before help arrives.



Sending a cop for an accident does very little if a car has gone into a pole, taking down a wire and ejecting the driver through the windshield. Once the cop gets there he can’t do anything except to have us advise fire and power company than wait for them to come. Fire will get there first, then they and the cop will wait for power to be turned off before anything can be done.

If Mr. Good Samaritan could have been bothered to step out onto his front porch, guy might have had a chance since aid could have starting working on him 15 minutes sooner. Oh, well at least caller didn’t miss the show they were watching...



25 years, lots of stories... that said, if you ever believe you are truly treated poorly, rudely, or the call receiver wasn’t helpful don’t hesitate to ask to speak to a supervisor so it can be looked into. All calls are recorded and it is a simple matter to review the tape. If correction is necessary, the sooner it is addressed, the better.

I couldn’t begin to top the stories 911boss has to tell, but I’ll add a couple based on my own limited time (12 years) as a 911 call-taker and emergency services dispatcher:

“You can’t miss it!” Well, I’m not the one going, and I guarantee that some people can miss anything. I once asked for the address of a call and the fire chief told me, “1881.” I fortunately knew that the street didn’t have an 1800 block and was able to direct the responders to the building that had been built in 1881.

“Why do you need a description of [the man, the vehicle, etc.]? It/he is right here!” It may be there now, but how about two minutes from now when the responding officer drives right by it because it’s now leaving the scene?

“Why do you need my name and contact information?” I’ll let the Assistant US Attorney who was prosecuting the bank robbery and who complimented me on getting it from a caller explain that. He pointed out that when witnesses aren’t anonymous it enhances the probity of their information and helps support the basis for a law enforcement contact.

I often see posts here from people who are seeking employment and/or would like to move to a better city or state from where they’re living. Dispatchers and 911 call-takers have one of the highest turnover rates of any job, and it’s very common for almost any center/agency to have openings all the time.

If you’re intelligent; can think and act quickly while dealing with multiple tasks; don’t mind dealing with people who have no one else to bully but public workers; can remain calm when everyone else is screaming hysterically (yes, being mechanical and not emotional); don’t mind working mandatory overtime at night, on weekends, holidays, or your kid’s birthday; are able to pass a demanding competency test, physical exam, and quite possibly a polygraph; and are comfortable with being sued for doing something in accordance with your protocols, then I encourage you to apply for one of those many openings all over the country. The reason that people like the one who is the subject of this thread get hired is because far too often they seem like the best choice available. If you can do a better job, please apply, get hired, do that better job, and believe me, at least a few of us will thank you for it.