Locked In with Ian Bick - I've Been a 911 Operator for 10+ Years - Here's What They Don't Tell You About the Job | Chris Barret

Episode Date: August 20, 2026

Chris Barrett has spent ten years as a 911 dispatcher in New Jersey — answering the calls that come in at the worst moments of people's lives, deciding what help to send and how fast, talking callers through situations most people never have to face, and carrying the weight of everything those calls produce long after the shift ends. In this episode of Locked In with Ian Bick, he shares what the training for that job actually involves, what the calls that still haunt him really looked like from the dispatcher who took them, how to de-escalate a caller in crisis, how dispatchers decide what kind of help to send, what the strangest calls he has ever received actually involved, and what ten years of sitting on the other end of the most desperate phone calls available does to a person's mental health. _____________________________________________ #911dispatcher #emergencyservices #truecrimecommunity #911 _____________________________________________ Thank you to CASH APP for sponsoring this episode:  Download Cash App Today: https://capl.onelink.me/vFut/ksjh06pb #CashAppPod _____________________________________________ Cash App is a financial services platform, not a bank. Banking services provided by Cash App's bank partner(s). Prepaid debit cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC. Cash App Visa® Debit Flex Cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC, and The Bancorp Bank, N.A., pursuant to a license from Visa U.S.A. Inc. See terms and conditions for the Sutton prepaid card, Sutton debit flex card, and Bancorp debit flex card. Discounts and promotions provided by Cash App, a Block, Inc. brand. Visit cash.app/legal/podcast for full disclosures. _____________________________________________ Hosted, Executive Produced & Edited By Ian Bick: https://www.instagram.com/ian_bick/?hl=en https://ianbick.com/ _____________________________________________ Timestamps: 00:00 Meet Chris Barrett 00:23 Early Life and Family 01:38 Adventurous Childhood 03:16 Career Aspirations 04:29 Why Firefighting? 05:23 Getting into Dispatch 07:08 The Dispatcher Test 08:03 Training and Trial by Fire 10:49 Common Newbie Mistakes 12:58 Warrant Checks Explained 14:20 Dispatch Center Setup 15:27 Anatomy of a 911 Call 17:44 Handling Silent Callers 19:43 Treating Everything as an Emergency 21:05 Prioritizing Calls 22:44 De-escalating Callers 27:03 Sponsor: Cash App 28:39 Calls About Suicide 33:56 Staying on the Line 34:50 When All Lines Are Busy 35:45 Busy Times and Call Volume 37:22 Most Common Calls 39:42 Regular and Mental Health Callers 41:03 911 vs Non-Emergency Lines 43:46 Focusing in a Noisy Room 45:19 Starting a Bad Day 47:56 Emotional Calls and Moving On 52:04 Calls Per Shift 53:12 Quiet Moments 55:27 Handling Car Accidents 01:02:04 Hypervigilance After Work 01:03:34 Sirens Off-Duty 01:05:03 Bonds with Officers 01:09:59 Mental Health Resources 01:11:43 Changes in Dispatching 01:19:01 Civilian vs Officer Dispatchers 01:20:43 Media Portrayals 01:24:42 Spotting Inconsistencies 01:27:26 Hardest Calls 01:32:42 Strangest Calls 01:37:28 Alarms and Tech 01:40:41 AI in Dispatch 01:42:01 Career Longevity 01:43:43 Career Lessons _____________________________________________ To advertise on the show, contact [e-mail] or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/LockedInWithIanBicka

He's the first voice people hear on the worst day of their lives. My guest today is Chris Barrett. He spent the last decade as a 911 dispatcher answering emergency calls when every second matters. Today, he's revealing what really happens on the other end of those calls and the moments that have stayed with him forever. Kind of bounced around a little bit early on in life, right? I was born in Baltimore. Shortly after that, we moved. but we've been in Jersey pretty much since.

I grew up in Bridgewater, Somerset County. Myself, I have three siblings, all younger. I'm the oldest. One sister, brother, and then a third sister who's much younger than all of us after my dad remarried. What did your parents do for work? Uh, mom was kind of a stay-at-home mom until we were old enough that we were going to school. Uh, then she kind of got into the school. She was doing like cafeteria work, you know, the lunch lady.

My mom was the lunch lady. Hey, nothing wrong with that. But, uh, then she moved into like, uh, ABA developmental disability type, uh, like classrooms and stuff like that. So she was in there, which, uh, she did that for a while. She actually just recently stopped doing that. she moved down South Jersey now, but she's still, uh, still into it. How are you as a kid? Uh, depends on who you ask, I guess.

If we asked your mom. Uh, I tended to try to behave, you know, I, I like to being outside. I was always outside doing something as long as there was, you know, nothing to get me in trouble. I wouldn't get in trouble. But if there was something to get in trouble with, I would, you know, I'd be scaling trees and falling down trees and getting hurt. Um, very adventurous. You know, I spent a lot of time in, uh, Boy Scouts, you know, uh, really, really enjoyed that, you know, getting out there doing it. Whatever, whatever, whatever you really wanted to do, you know, the adults in my Boy Scout troop, you know, the dads would come out. And, uh, it was kind of, uh, they were hanging out and the, the boys ran the trip kind of thing.

So they'd be in the background and they'd watch you do something and they'd say, yeah, it's probably not a good idea. They just let you keep going. So you learned a lot. A lot of problem-solving experience was picked up on those trips and the outings. Do you think that would help you later on in your career? I think I still use that today, every day. And I bring kind of the same mentality towards my kids now that my dad had. It probably won't get hurt real bad, but they're probably going to learn a lesson.

So we'll let them learn a lesson gently. You know, but yeah, definitely a big, a big thing that I look back on pretty much every day. You got a problem, solve the problem is what you got. What did young Chris want to become when he grew up? I bounced around a little bit, you know. I wanted to be a fireman for a long time. ended up at some point transferring that to want it to be a Coast Guard diver because I saw the movie with Ashton Coucher, The Guardian.

I've seen that like a hundred times. Yeah, I saw that. And I'm like, yep, that's it. That's what I'm going to do. And it didn't work out. I did join my volunteer fire department when I was 16. I rode as a junior, then went through all the train and continued riding as I got older and really kind of pulled back right around COVID times.

So I was still riding, loved it. Actually took a test to be a career guy up in Norwalk years ago. Connecticut? Yeah. Oh, wow. Years and years ago. And that didn't really pan out. So I just kind of, I was kind of going through it.

And then I just kind of dipped my feet into everything as I got older. You know, I've done construction. I worked as a mechanic for five, six years. and then ended up at dispatch. What do you think it was about being a firefighter that you enjoyed? I mean, there's definitely an adrenaline rush that comes with it. But the idea that you're out there and you're helping somebody, you're part of something that's leading to a solution that's helping somebody on what's, you know,

what's their worst day. working together with a bunch of guys, the guys are all great. You know, there's a whole mentality, a lot like the police officers and stuff you've had on here, where everybody's kind of, you know, ragging on everybody else. It's the same kind of mentality, and it's just really, it's a brotherhood big time. And luckily, you know, the career fire thing didn't work out, and I've kind of found that in dispatch. So tell us about how you got into dispatch, how it stumbled on you.

So dispatch, right? Dispatch is, it's really central to every emergency response, right? You don't get an emergency response without somebody calling, either calling 911 calling dispatch. So even on the fire department, there was a time where, you know, dispatch is telling me what to do. This is, you know, dispatch is calling us on the radio. Dispatch is toning us out to go hear. go there. So it's always kind of been there, but I never was like, yeah, maybe I'll be a dispatcher. And I was working as a mechanic at the time. And a test came out to go work for dispatch. I'm like, you know, I'm at this point 20-something years old. It was wintertime. I'm getting beat up, you know, snow's dropping on my head from the cars on the lifts above me. I'm like, I'm 20-something. I feel like I'm going off 50-something, beating my body up. Let me go take the test. Let me just go see what it's about.

See what happens. If I don't get it, I don't get it. And took the test, passed the test, first shot. I got an interview. And I was sitting there and I'm like, you know what? Yeah, this is cool. This is giving me an opportunity to go back to, you know, I help people with the volunteer fire department,

but now I can help people and, you know, make it my career. and really have a central, centralized kind of viewpoint on, this is my career. I can focus on this 100% of the time. And I just, I got in and I never looked back. That was it. What's a test like to become a dispatcher? At the time, I haven't taken it in a long time. But it's a lot of like recordings, a player recording.

And it's a write down what you hear. It's a test. It's not like a state test or like a civil service test kind of thing. You know, we set it up in the conference room up at our county building. And listen to what you hear, write down what you hear. You know, what color was this, you know, actor's shirt after the recording is done. See how much you've retained. And that's really, really like a just a comprehensive.

comprehension type deal. See what you can understand on it. I don't know if they've changed it since, but that was, that was it. Now, is there an academy they send you to, or is it just regular training? Are you paired up with someone, or are you just thrown into the fire and have to kind of learn? Yeah. When I started, there was no academy, anything else. You're trial by fire. You're coming in. You may get a day. You listen to, you know, a trainer. And maybe day two, you're on the radio. So, I mean, my first radio transmission was, you know, county to a Benminster car. Because I'm, you know, I'm used to being on the fire department. I don't talk talking to radio. I keep the radio in my pocket. I don't touch it. That's it. That's for the other people to worry about.

And it was like a mental thing about everybody's listening to me. And now I'm center stage. whoops what am I going to do uh I know the I was watching the the police officer you had on from Indiana a while back he said the same thing he said once he'd get up on that radio the first time and I watched that and I was like that's exactly it my trainer turned he looked at me and I knew I knew my trainer at the time he was uh he was the deputy chief of the fire department when I joined it and uh he looked to me and he goes what was that was like I I I I don't know. I panicked. I don't know what to do.

But, uh, so you sit, you sit with a trainer. Um, they're basically over your shoulder watching you do everything, you know, dealing with real emergencies, real time. Uh, since we've kind of implemented a training academy, which is a couple of weeks where you go in the back of the room, we have a CAD system. We'll have, now we have other dispatchers, other trainers come in and they'll teach, you know, this is how you check. You know, this is how you somebody for warrants. This is how you, you know, talk on the radio. This is the proper terminology for this. Um, and kind of gives them that background before they come out on the desk. And then they come out on the desk. And then it's trial by fire once they get out there. Um,

trainings usually, usually around six months to a year. Um, and they're on the desk. They're doing it. trainees or, you know, they're carrying the weight while the trainers are sitting back watching making sure that they're not messing up too too bad, you know. Because it's really, I mean, there's so many different disciplines we have to be aware of and somebody may be coming in with no, you know, no background knowledge of anything. It takes a while and there's a lot, a lot of info. What are some common mistakes people make when they first get on? I don't know. I don't know if I'd call them mistakes. It's more of a...

Okay. Yeah, I got one. We got our consoles, right? We have four screens on the bottom and then we have three screens up top. We have three different mice on our desk. We have three different keyboards and we have a phone keyboard. Now I'm a trainer as well. So now I get to watch this real time. I laugh to myself because I was doing the same thing. You have to pick which mouse you're going to use. This one operates the radio. This one operates your CAD. This one operates your accounting computer up top, which, you know, is Internet and everything else.

They're going to talk on the radio. They grab the wrong mouse. Why isn't it working? Then they have to grab the other mouse. And it's almost comical to watch. And then you just sit in the background and you tell them, yeah, wrong mouse. You got the wrong mouse. and by the time they figured out, they're like, yeah, wrong mouse, I got it, I know.

You know, they pick up on it pretty fast. But I mean, as far as mistakes go, you have that supervision where you're not really doing a mistake that's going to, you know, get anybody hurt, get anybody in trouble, that kind of stuff. If you're checking somebody for warrants, you know, throughout the training process, you could be ready to come off of training. You're checking somebody for warrants over there. Your trainer is going to be sitting over at their desk or should be sitting at their desk, checking them for warrants as well. And before you key up and you tell whichever officer is out there, no, they're good. If there's something, they say, oh, hold up. Did you check this? They have one because you don't want to have an officer that's out. I didn't tell, no, there's no warrants. And then there is one that would be frowned upon? No, is this checking for warrants when a cop pulls someone over and they ask if there's warrants for this person or run the plates or is it when they're just responding to a 911 emergency and you're just checking all the people there?

Yeah, so we're very, it's very limited what we're allowed to do. I don't want to say what we're allowed to do because we're allowed to do it. As far as warrant checks and stuff like that goes, you don't want to be just running somebody willy-nilly just, you know, it's public or not public information. It's private information. You don't want to be, you know, hey, I'm going to go home and I'm going to just decide to check Ian and see if he's got any warrants, you know. Why not? Everything is monitored. There's a reason. There needs to be a reason why you're checking them.

So generally, it's officer initiated. So if an officer's out on a traffic stop, they'll ask you, can you check this guy, run them all around? Is the general terminology? We're checking federal or, yeah, federal databases. We're checking local databases just to see. And then if we find something, we let them know. So are there different, I guess, stations? You know, you have your 911 calls coming in. then you also have your, say, from a law enforcement officer just pinging in to, you know, see what's going on with, say, a warrant or on a traffic stop? As far as like different, I guess, different people in charge of different areas or do all the calls come in to you as a group and then that's dispersed out or how does that work?

Yeah, so the way we have everything situated at our center, right? We have, we split it by sides of the room, right? So the backside of the room, that's your 911 call takers. 911 call takers will take their phone calls. They'll dispatch fire departments. They'll dispatch ambulances. Answered non-emergency police calls. You know, that's the busier side of the room.

You know, if you're working on a Sunday, you don't want to be on that side of the room. The other side of the room is the PD side. So that's police dispatch. We have six police dispatchers. And you have your area that you're a. signed to. So you're in, you're in charge of this town. Maybe you have one town, maybe you have three towns that are like lower volume towns. And that, that's your, the officer calls in, the officer needs something on the road. Call ticker, take the call, they'll put them on hold,

and you'll pick it up, say, hey, what's up? What do you need? So everything is managed kind of by area on the police side of things. Can you walk us through a call, just any type of call that comes in, how that works? You're talking like emergency calls? It could be anyone just to kind of show the process. Yeah, so I mean, if you have an emergency call, right, somebody calls in, they're calling 911 for something. It'll get routed to our center, our call taker will answer the phone.

911, where is your emergency? That's the first question to ask, where are you? Because, you know, if you tell me where you are and then you immediately hang up the phone, I have the info. I now know where you are, I can at least send somebody. They'll take the pertinent information, location information, you know, initial, depending on if it's like a highly emergent call, you know, somebody needs, you know, medical assistance, something like that.

They will update the information into the CAD, and then they'll do what's called Update and Continue. So they take the information they have on their screen, and they shoot it out to the CADs across the room. So that goes to everybody's screen. So your police dispatcher sees it. The other call takers see it. If an ambulance needs to be dispatched, they'll dispatch the ambulance on it.

And then the call taker, in the event of a medical emergency, right, we're trained to give what's called EMD. It's emergency medical dispatch. So we can start to give some sort of medical instruction prior to anybody's arrival. So CPR instructions, we can give the compressions count out loud with me, you know, everything down to a nosebleed, you know, pinch your fingers, you know, pinch your nose between your fingers and lean forward, don't lean back. So they'll be given that information on a medical call and updating the rest of the room via the CAD as they get more information. And then police dispatcher will update the police department

responding out there. EMS will update, get updates via the other call takers in the room. And if we need, you know, additional agencies to respond out there, call takers will then reach out to them and get them going too. What do you do if you have someone that calls 911 but isn't talking? It's just say breathing or, you know, you might suspect something's wrong. Yeah, so our center is pretty good. We have a, it's called NextGen 911. We implemented that. And what will happen is if you dial 911, we get a plot on our map.

So our phone screen, right, we have two screens for the phone. Bottom screen is usually caller information, dispatcher information, you know, who's on the phone, is everybody busy, what's going on, who's doing what. Top screen is a map. It's just a, it looks like Google Maps. And way more advanced than Google Maps, we can pull up, you know, tax information. We can pull up a whole bunch of stuff with our phone system. It'll show a little dot. The dot is a radius, you know, it could be 15 meters, could be 100 meters, it could be more than that.

Depending on what kind of plot we have, we have an idea of where you're at. Generally, with the next gen, we can narrow it down pretty well. It's pretty accurate. So in the event of that, that's going in the CAD. Anytime you call 911, something's going in the CAD for it, regardless. If we talk to you, if we don't talk to you. We'll really listen in, especially if it's just an open line 911. We'll listen in.

We'll see if we hear anything in the background. This sounds strange. You know, maybe people talking. Let's try to pick up what they're saying. Do we hear landscaping equipment in the background? okay, maybe, you know, it sounds like somebody who's probably out mowing their lawn, you know, hit the button on their iPhone too many times, and it's, it dialed by accident, they have no idea they're on the phone with us.

Still going in. We're still sending somebody out. We're going to have them look for the guy on the tractor at that point, you know. Generally, if it's an open line, we'll stay on for a while, make sure we don't hear anything emergent, nothing that we can get any information from. And we'll hang up. back. If you dial 911 and you hang up your phone right away, it's still going to come through to us and we're still going to call you back. And you're going to say, oh, no, I didn't call 911.

We're going to leave you a voicemail. We're going to say, hey, this is the 911 center? Your phone dialed 911. Do you have an emergency or leave a voicemail, you know, 911, you know, 911. Your phone dial 911. If you have an emergency, call us back. Stay on the line. Wait to speak to an operator. but as long as we get a good plot on where you're at or a decent plot, we'll send somebody out. Now, say it's a guy in the tractor like you're just describing, is that treated with the same level of urgency? Yeah, I mean, everything is because, I mean, think about it, right? Just you hear a tractor in the background, say, you know, somebody fell off a tractor. Tractor's on top of them.

I can't tell that from the phone call. I have to take everything. I have to treat everything like, you know, everything. Everything is an emergency in this regard. And we document everything we hear. You know, we're putting the notes of the file. You know, tractor heard running in the background. No voice contact made.

Something along those lines. Now, how does that differ from, say, the neighbor next door calling for a complaint about another neighbor's dog barking where you actually make contact with the person, but it's not an emergency, so to say? I mean, they're still going to get someone, you know. But if you get somebody that's calling in and saying, you know, my neighbor's dog is barking, it's 7 o'clock at night, you know. And there's nothing wrong with their neighbor, right?

Because a lot of times they'll call to say, my neighbor's dog's outside. Dogs been outside for two days. I haven't heard from my neighbor. That's a little bit different than, you know, my neighbor's dog is outside and it's a, you know, it's a nuisance kind of thing. They'll still respond out there. They'll still get an officer that'll come out and talk to them, talk to the neighbor. whoever. But if we have that at the exact same time as we have something else going on,

you know, say there's a medical call. Medical calls are priority almost all the time, right? Medical calls are like aggressive calls where somebody could get injured that is more of a police call, you know, an assault, a fight, domestic kind of incident. That's going to take higher priority than the barking dog. So you'll put both of them out as a dispatcher. You'll tell them about both. But they're going to lean towards the more emergent call. You know, if they have enough guys to cover both at the same time, awesome.

But if they don't, we're going to wait a little bit to go to the barking dog complaint. You know, maybe we'll call them back, let them know, hey, it's going to be a little bit. We got officers tied up on an emergent call. And they'll be out there as soon as they again. Now, how do you handle a caller that's, say, hyperventilating or is, you know, really scared or isn't really giving you the information you need because of the environment or the situation there and that's an emergency. That happens a lot, actually.

There's a couple different ways, right? And everybody will kind of do it a little bit differently. You know, the way I kind of look at it, right, if somebody's having a hard time and you start shouting at them, not shouting, but you get a little bit more, sometimes you got to give a caller a little bit more oomph to, you know, hey, I need you to talk to me. Stop fighting with so-and-so. Talk to me. I need the information.

But if they're hysterical, hysterical, sometimes there's a couple of tricks we use. We can talk quieter to them, make them listen to what we're saying, use their name. That's a big one. If I got somebody who's not listening to a word I'm saying, they're dealing with what they have going on, which it's understandable, right? They got, people are calling on the worst days of their lives. You know, most of the time they call 911, what, once twice in their life? life. It's every day for us. It's not every day for them. Um, use their name. Get their name. Hey, Ian, talk to me, man. What's going on? What do you have going on there? Try to, try to snap

them out of it. Because usually once you get them and they're focused on you and they're talking to you and you can keep them talking on you, you can get the information pretty quickly. Even if you're asking, you know, medical calls a lot of times what I like to do and what I tell my trainees to do, right? Ask them the information we need, the super important information, and while you're typing that into the CAD, because you're doing six different things at once already. Ask them a question that doesn't have a super crazy importance. You know, if you remember the answer to it, cool.

If you don't, it's not make or break if you're going to get that info. and, you know, hey, my brother's on the floor, you know, he's diabetic. He's not responding to me, that kind of stuff. Okay. How long has it been going on for? Like, how long has he been down? Do you know how long he's been down? At this point, it doesn't matter.

He's still getting the same response. He's getting a ALS unit, which is advanced life support. He's getting a BLS unit, which is just your ambulance, your basic life support is getting a police officer. And we're going to start giving him that medical information. But now we have that two seconds or so for him to tell him, oh, yeah, he's been now. I watched him when he was falling off the couch, right? We have that little split second to get that super important information in there, get it in there clearly.

So there's no questions from anybody across the room saying, hey, what's that note say? I don't know. That note's not in English. you know, use those questions to keep them involved. Keep them, you know, locked into the phone calls. So if they're answering questions, they have a job to do, right? If you have a job to do, you're going to keep doing your job.

Listen, I need you to help me out. I have everybody coming to you, but I need you to tell me what's going on. Do you see this? Do you see that? There are our eyes. So if we can't get anything out of them, you know, we're going to do our best. We, you know, that's, we only got what we got. I have to admit something.

For someone who interviews fraud investigators, IRS agents, detectives, and former scammers all the time, I almost got got. I got one of those text messages saying I had an unpaid toll and needed to pay it immediately. At first, I laughed, then I clicked it. Then I thought, wait, did I actually drive through a toll somewhere? For about 45 seconds, I completely talked myself into believing it.

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fraud monitoring. Spend with a peace of mind today and order a cash app card. in the app or at cash.app slash card. New Cash app customers can earn $10 if they use code Secure 10 in their profile at sign up and send $5 to a friend within 14 days. Terms apply. Cash app is a financial services platform, not a bank, banking services provided by Cash Apps bank partners, prepaid debit cards issued by Sutton Bank, member FDIC, Cash App Visa

Debit Flex cards issued by Sutton Bank. member FDIC and the Bancorp Bank, N.A., pursuant to a license from Visa USA Incorporated. See terms and conditions for the Sutton prepaid card, Sutton Debit Flex card, and Bancorp Debit Flex card. Discounts and promotions provided by Cash App, a Block Incorporated brand, visit cache.com slash legal slash podcast for full disclosures. What about those calls where someone, you know, tells you before they're going to do something, tells you before they might commit suicide or might hurt someone else. How do you de-escalate those calls? Yeah, so I, it's really kind of a situational thing. And I have an example, like, I'll use

an example. I took a, I took a phone call for one of our towns. And it was a guy, it turns out he was, he was in his garage. And he, he said, I have a gun, come to my house, shoot me. Okay. All right. What's going on? Where are you? Gives you the address. Confirm the address. We always confirm our addresses because we don't want to send them to the house next door. And, you know, that would be, you know, grandma's got 18 police officers outside their house waiting for her. And she goes, what's going on? And meanwhile, the guy called his next door. Shoot me. All right. What's going on? Why are you calling for this? uh turns out the guy had lost his job uh he was in a in a bad spot mentally and that

i got it you know at that point i had had you know my wife had gotten laid off a couple weeks prior to that so i'm like oh i get it stressful right he goes i can't do it anymore i just want you to come in my house to shoot me well listen man nobody wants to do that talk to me what what's what's going on you lost you lost your job Okay. Is anybody in the house with you? He said he's got a gun. I need now I'm worried about him and I'm worried about everybody else My son is upstairs sleeping. Okay? Think about your son What's what's gonna happen with your son if they come there and that happens? Nobody nobody wants to come there and hurt you Let me get you some help. Let's get you some some help. No, no, no, no, no. Got his name

And that was really when I kind of knew that he was going to be receptive. He gave me first name. He gave me last name. But I mean, this dude was distraught. If you've never heard a grown man just absolutely hysterically, you know, it hits you somewhere. You know, as a guy, you're like, wow, this man, he just, he sounds broken. So we ended up I ended up talking to him for a little while

Got a little bit more information I'm like dude think think of your son man think about it right He goes don't touch my son nobody's gonna touch your son but you're you're in the garage of the house They come there and they do that what's your what's gonna happen with your son And eventually the outcome you know his parents I don't know if they were already there or if they had gotten there because he didn't tell me they were there initially. His parents, I heard them talking in the background. I go, hey, who's there with you? And they were answering, oh, it's his parents,

so it must have had the phone number speaker. So long story short, the outcome, the officers were waiting outside. He put down the gun. I don't know if it was real fake, you know, and actually walked outside to the front yard. and the officers, you know, met him in the front yard. And they said, hey, man, you're not in any, you're not in trouble.

We want to get you some help. Just, you know, took him, took him into custody, detained him and got him the help he needed. You know, something that could have ended way worse. But, I mean, that's, that's one of the things dispatchers tend to do on the emergency calls, right? That's our job. We want this situation de-escalated by the time our officers arrive. because we're worried about the caller safety, but at the same time, that police desk,

we have officer safety at mine. Hey, this guy's got a gun. We're worried about you. You're on scene for five minutes. On something like that, we're checking on you. Hey, what's your status? You okay? You got another five minutes.

Your timer's running. We're going to check you again in five minutes. But that was a big one. That was a big one for me. the police department that responded out there is one of the best we work with. I really, really enjoy working with them. But they recognized us.

They gave us citation awards, the dispatchers, both the police dispatcher and me as a call taker had us out to, you know, a dinner out in their town to, you know, recognize us. And it was,

it was nice, nice being recognized for sure. It's not why we do it, but it was a good, a good, a good moment brought my wife out, got to show off a little bit, you know, hey, check it out. This is what I do.

Now, a call like that, you'll stay on all the way until it concludes for that type of situation. Yep, absolutely. But say it's a situation where you're just dispatching, you know, an emergency vehicle. It ends right there and it's on to the next call. It depends. So like if it's an unconscious person or something like that, if somebody's unconscious, we're staying on the phone until somebody gets there. We are the medical authority on scene. We're not on scene, but we're there.

the only medical authority. Once somebody else gets there, okay, we're, we're good, we can disconnect. But yeah, it's, it's doing it, most of the time it's busy down there on nines. We have, you know, four, maybe five call takers. We got 350,000 residents. So we're, we're busy. What happens when all the calls are in use, all the phones are in use? So we have, we have backup centers, our calls will get routed to the neighboring county. Double-edged sword, we're also the backup center for other neighboring counties. Currently, it's actually two because they're working through switching some stuff over. So like rainstorms, thunderstorms, you know, big storms we had last month, we were getting,

we were getting it. We were getting it good. It was, you know, we had this county's calls coming in, then we had our calls, and then we had the next county's calls coming in. We're like, you know, this is wild. This is crazy. We need more people here. And we'll send out a text page saying, hey, any available people come and come and work at the ComCenter Place. We need, you know, we need help.

Aside from the storms, obviously, what are the busiest days of the year? Is it like a specific holiday or? I mean, it depends. you get you get different calls at different times the year right so obviously holidays like come around winter time the holiday season you know everybody tends to we get a lot of you know suicides that kind of stuff um years back i think we had four suicides and one day me and my trainee that were sitting sitting sitting the desk and i was like yeah you you're done you're coming off training tomorrow i got you're you're a black cloud i don't want to deal with you anymore

you know, we're not doing this. Not, not again. But, and that's just that, that real dark, that dark humor that we have down there. Once the weather starts getting nice, we'll start getting, you know, the neighbor complaints. Everybody's leaving their house. They're, you know, running around. But I, I mean, there's no, I wouldn't say there's necessarily a busier time of the year, just call volume-wise, it's more, we get these types of calls at this time of year. But we're generally, call volume-wise, we're generally pretty busy across the board. I think we had, when I left yesterday, we had 270,000 calls already this year. That's crazy.

Yeah, so, and we'll do, you know, what month is it August? What's the most common call you receive? Truthfully, 911 abandons. somebody will dial 911 and hang up real quick. Oh, whoops. Like as a game or? No,

just like a pocket dial accidentally. You end up calling them back and say, hey, you know, this is the 911 one center. You call 911 one. Oh, I'm so sorry.

My phone was in my pocket or you'll have the person. No, no, I didn't call 911. No, no, you did, but you're not in trouble.

You know, a lot of those. Those aren't, you know, necessarily, something that we really have too, too much to do with. But the, I mean, my opinion, we're, we're catching a lot more mental health type cause lately. And I don't know what, what's causing it. I'm not, you know, that's above my pay grade. But we are getting a lot more mental health

type calls. You know, somebody having a mental breakdown, you know, a parent calling for their child that's, you know, just losing it and throwing stuff around the house and breaking things. And it, yeah, it's, that's, that's probably one of the more common calls we get. And again, we, we have the medical calls. any medical call we're spending time given information, taken, you know,

given those EMD instructions. But luckily, uh, our dispatchers took a course. It's called, uh, we have EMD, right? We talked about EMD emergency medical dispatch. We can give those medical instructions.

We, uh, we took a class for EMHD, which is similar, but it focuses on mental health type stuff. So it was a three-day course we took. And we have guide cards. Hey, if they say this, maybe look into doing this, you know. So that's been helpful.

I actually used that with that previous call that I talked about before. Are there people that call you just to talk? Maybe they're having a, you know, a mental health issue or? Yeah. We have, we have our callers that we know by first name. They call in and, hey, what's going on? You know, I don't want to say any names, but we know who they are. Hey, what's up?

What's going on today? And, yeah, we definitely have our regulars. They say anything, though, we still got to, you know, the liability involved. Still got to, you know, they call on an non-emergency line just to chat. Cool. Call on an 911 line. We got to tell the officers you called. You say something while we're on the line, even if it's a non-emergency call,

you say something while we're on the phone. That's a little questionable. I'm going to pull you up in this system. I'm going to pull up your address because I can't get your location on my phone screen from a non-emergency call, but I know where you live. Like, we deal with you. I don't want to say deal with you. We interact with you, you know, so many times a week.

You know, we're going to send somebody out. say something that's a little off. Like, hey, we're just going to send somebody to check on you. You know, no big deal, you're not in trouble. You know, just to make sure you're all right. Now, what's the difference between calling 911 or Googling, say, the local police station and calling that number on there? So 911 gets a dedicated 911 line, right? Anytime you call 911, we're putting a file in our CAD.

We're sending somebody, as long as we have a location on you, we're going to send somebody. we're going to notify at least at the very least we're going to notify an officer that you called um non-emergency you know stuff like barking dogs call the non-emergency line for your barking dog complaint call the non-emergency line for you know my neighbor cut down a tree it's actually in my yard but it's not not in their yard and they you know non-emergency stuff should go to the not emergency line. 911s are going to get treated as emergencies all the time. Vice versa, you call the not emergency line and you're reporting an emergency.

A lot of older people like to do that. They like to call 911 or the not emergency line and they'll say, well, you know, it's not really an emergency, but my wife has been asleep for two days. Like, you sure that's not. really an emergency because it kind of sounds like it might be an emergency, we're going to treat that now, even though it's on a non-emergency line, we're going to treat that as an emergency. That's going to get the same emergency response that it would because we can just, you just shift gears. You just put a cat file in and, you know, the rest of the room. That's why I said, you know,

we got, we got 40-something people down there doing it. We are, it's like a machine. It's wild to see, especially when it's busy. You put a cat file in. You don't have to say anything. They're listening from across the room. They can hear you ask certain questions and they know what kind of calls coming in. If I ask you, how old is she? There's a good shot that's going to be a medical call, right? I need the age of the patient. How old is she? And what's going on? You said, this will say things so that they can pick up on it and they can hear it and then they're sitting there they're ready for that file to drop in there and the second it drops in there they're ready to bang out the call to whatever agency needs it you know the rescue squad some one person will be toning out the rescue

squad the other person will be reaching out to the advanced life support if they need it third person across the room is sending your police department it's it's all it happens all instantaneously and none of us are saying a word to each other how do you block out the noise in a room like that just focusing on that specific call when there's hundreds of other calls going on? It's weird. I like to joke about it, right? I joke about it with my wife. I tell her that dispatchers have a superpower where we can have four different conversations all at once, right?

I can be sitting here. We can be talking to you. Somebody could be saying something over here because we're doing it, right? If we're on the phone calling somebody and we're doing a police desk and the police officer calls, we've got to answer both. right? You know, we're calling for a tow truck because somebody got an accident and the officer calls and they're giving us information. I'm listening to the tow truck driver with this year. I'm listening to the police officer with this year. And we can take both and kind of meld them together. I would try to explain it to you. I can't. I can't. It's just, it's something after years of doing it. It's just everybody has it too. It's wild. But when you have that caller, it's almost like a tunnel vision kind of thing, right?

Not tunnel vision in the bad sense where, like, you don't know what's going on around you. You're focused on that. There's words that they'll say that will perk you up. There could be something that somebody, you know, at the desk next to you while you're on this emergency call, says you pick up on that and you're like, whoa, hold up, wait, maybe that's related to my call. How do you do it? It's just years of doing it. I mean, you're doing six things at once all the time.

time, from the time you walk in the room to the time you leave, you're busy. Now, what about if you wake up, you know, it's just a bad day? You know, you get into a fight with your wife or something happened, maybe you got into a car accident or something, you're miserable. Is this the type of job you can go into work with that mindset or attitude? I mean, it depends, right? Everybody always says, you know, check it at the door, right? You walk in here, that's it. And I think, you know, my agency, we do a pretty good job of that, right? But there's days where, like, you wake up and you're like, you know, my dog died last night. Like, I'm having a real bad day. I can't go to work, right? You can take a mental health day.

If you're going to, if you truly believe that your mindset coming into work is going to have some sort of detriment to somebody in our community, you know, the towns we dispatch for our residents, don't put them through that. You know what I mean? That's because you're not doing them any favors. You're not doing you any favors. Just, you don't take them into health. You got the time. Use the time.

But, I mean, it, I think a lot of people tend not to do that. And it's not just our agency. It's across across the country is staffing. staffing is an issue with com centers and you call out sick you know somebody may have to stay your your co-workers 12-hour shift just turned into a 16-hour shift and the person who's coming in for their mandatory overtime in the morning well they're the only person that can cover that that middle block of shifts you know so they were coming in from 7 a.m. to 11 a.m. well now they have to stay 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. because you can't be here. We have a minimum staffing level we have to keep.

So I think it leads some people to kind of, you know, say, I can do it. But, I mean, personally, I come in, I check it at the door. I leave. I try to check work at the door on my way out the door. but once you get that caller on the line reporting an emergency, that's it. That is for the next five to ten minutes, two to three minutes, however long you have them on the phone, that's your job. That is all you're focused on. Now, when you have those really emotional calls like you were describing earlier where you form that connection or report with someone, how do you just, you know, go on to the next call after that or not think about them to find out the outcome? or even maybe a week later, do you follow up? How does that work? So a lot of times we won't get any outcome, right? We could try, you know, if we know

if we know somebody within a different agency that we can reach out to or the police officer that response because the police are probably going to take a report on it, you could reach out to the police officer and ask them. But a lot of times the outcome is, you know, you don't know. You know, you have the emotional calls, but then you're right on to the next one as soon as you hang up with that. You know, or you're taking a call where somebody is reporting, you know, their parent, you know, parent died. You're giving them CPR instructions and the next time you pick up the phone, you know, you're taking that barking dog complaint. It's just, we just kind of, you move on, but you don't, you don't forget it. Like, you can, I can tell you emotional calls that I've taken, you know, back when I was on training,

I got calls that still stand out. And this is, we're talking 10 years ago. You know, it's, it's weird. And, and it's almost like a lot of, a lot of the other people you have come on here that, that kind of are in the same kind of realm here. they talk about how it's not an immediate thing you take one phone call or you deal with one emergency and you know you start to experience that mental health side of things on your own end right it's something that builds up kind of over time right so like like uh you had a police officer from new jersey that was involved in a in a shooting that ended up retiring i can't remember

his name. I'm terrible. Kevin. The dude with the coffee. Donaldson, Kevin Donaldson. Yeah. He, see, I pick up on weird stuff. The dude they gave you the coffee at the beginning of the show.

Good memory. Yeah. He was talking about how, you know, his interactions with his wife when he went home, right? I got three kids at home. I go home and it's game on. You know, it's a party. And my wife always asked me. she makes a point to ask me every day when I woke home.

I was work today. Well, I've been there since, you know, 3 o'clock this morning. It's 7 o'clock at night now. And, you know, I catch myself responding with, you know, I was busy. Meanwhile, I've dealt with, you know, that suicidal caller that I had. She didn't know about that until I was getting the award. We don't talk about it. They didn't sign up for that.

They don't want to deal with it. They do want to deal with it. You know, obviously they care about you and they want to. you know, make sure you're doing all right, but you kind of compartmentalize it. You kind of keep it inside. And this is, you know, something that eventually you get to a point where it's like, all right, this is, I need to find a way to, you know, let it out. And you know, you feel for all those individuals, anyone in the first responder world before podcast, before YouTube, before interviews where they didn't get to hear other people talking about it.

Right. And it's... It was just their circle of individuals, and in most cases, most of these individuals never talked about it to begin with. And it's, I mean, it's wild. You're sitting there and I'm watching it. I'm like, hey, I do that. It's crazy.

Maybe it's not just me that does that, you know. But, uh, but, uh, but yeah, it's definitely a thing. Definitely a thing that happens. And, I mean, especially you're taking how many phone calls a shift if you're working 16 hours. Yeah, how many do you think it comes out to you? Honestly, I couldn't even begin to guess. I mean, you're talking, we'll have periods where we have five minutes in between phone calls.

We'll have periods where we hang up the phone. We pick up the phone right away. You know, generally, our incident stack will keep incidents in there for 12 hours. So I can tell you that I've seen that incident stack at, 500. I've seen that incident stack at 1,500. And that's the whole, I mean, that's the whole center, right? So it's not like I'm sitting here, you know, I've got to go home. I've been here 16 hours. I've answered 1,500 phone calls today. No, it's not, it's not at all. That's, that's 1,500 calls for service, you know, vehicle stops for the police, you know, checking properties, that kind of stuff. So that's all factored in there. But, I mean, it's, we, we stay.

We definitely stay busy. And it's, yeah. Is there ever a time where it's just eerily quiet? Can't say that word. That Q word, that's, you get brought up on charges for using the Q word. You can't say that. There's, there's times where it's like, okay, what, you know, what's going on? I'm sitting here, not that I'm wishing for something bad to happen, but like,

it's going to be a long day if, you know, we got nothing to focus on here for a while. But I wouldn't say eerily, there's always something going on, right? You know, we're 24 hours a day. So we have our night shift that works 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. We have our day shift that works 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. And you have those shifts split up. Basically, they split it up, you know, from a scheduling standpoint. It's split up in three-hour increments, right?

or four-hour increments rather three four-hour increments so you have your seven to eleven one-to-one-hundred portion of your shift your 11 to 1,500 portion of your shift your 15-100 portion of your shift if you work day shift right if I'm off I can pick up any one of those four-hour blocks to come in and kind of you know pick up some overtime come in help out if nobody does that somebody's going to get mandatory to come in and work it anyway but that's that minimum staffing level we got to keep. I'm a big 3 a.m. to 7 a.m. overtime guy. So yesterday I went into work at 3 o'clock in the morning and worked until 7 o'clock in the morning. That was my overtime and then my normal shift started at 7 a.m. You would think 3 o'clock in the morning. You know,

bars closed down 2 o'clock. You know, everybody's probably home by now. People are still having emergencies. Emergencies don't care what time it is, you know. We could call in at 4 o'clock in the morning and have something crazy going on. You could come in at 4 o'clock in the morning. There could be almost nothing going on. But there's generally always something going on. It's just a little different call volume wise. Tell us about taking calls for car accidents, how that works.

Because most of the time it's probably a bystandard that calls it in. Yeah, well, it depends. You have a wreck on the interstate. you're going to get 5,000 different phone calls. You have to try to find the one that, you know, are you involved? No. Okay. We'll get it from bystanders.

We'll get it from the people involved. We'll get it from everybody and our questions are going to be almost exactly the same for every accident. Okay. Are you involved? Yes. No. Yes, if you are involved, does anybody hurt? That's medical.

First thing. I want to make sure nobody's hurt. Okay. Nobody's hurt. Either the vehicle is smoking or on fire. No, okay. Are you off to the shoulder? Make sure you're in a safe spot. I don't want you, you know, next thing you know, we've got a secondary accident going on. So we're trying to manage the scene prior to anybody getting there. Once we've verified, there's no injuries, that kind of stuff. We'll get your vehicle descriptions and name, callback phone number. And then we'll, you know, well, as soon as I put that file in, they're sending the police out there anyway. but yeah car accidents are pretty we get we get a lot of them and it and it you know my wife tells me

I get angry while I'm driving because people just don't pay attention and I'm like well you know you got people that don't pay attention and then people get hurt because they're just you know but I mean I car accidents are routine to say the least and routine sounds bad but it's not, you know, not something where we're like, oh, yeah, just another car accident. You know, every call gets the same, you get the same, you know, focus from your dispatcher, especially at our agency. I mean, our dispatchers, I know I've said it before.

I'll say it again, I'll say it a million times. I would trust any one of the people I work with with my family. And I do. I live in the county that I work in. and I have no issues. If I have something going on in my house, I'll call them. Trust any one of them. It's a family.

So, you know, we do get car accidents. That kind of hits you different. Took a phone call from a guy years back. Driving through a residential neighborhood, night shift, middle of the night, three, four o'clock in the morning. Flip this car. Okay. Are you hurt?

You flipped your car. You're getting an ambulance. You know, I don't care if you're hurt. You say you're hurt. You're not hurt. You're getting an ambulance. Flip your car. You're getting everybody.

You're going to have fire department ambulance, paramedics, everybody. No, I don't think I'm too badly hurt, right? Okay. No problem. We have everybody coming out to you. You know, is anybody in the car with you? Yeah, my girlfriend. Okay.

She hurt. This girlfriend was in the passenger, so he didn't make it. She was on impact. I remember this one because I'll go into that in a second, but that's like a, you sit back after the call and you're like, you're in a residential neighborhood. How did this, like, how did this happen? And, you know, stuff happens. Deer jump out. You know, I saw the deer sign all the way up here.

So you have the same problem here that we have, you know, in Jersey where, you know, you're driving down the road. Next thing you know, the whole family of deer decided, hey, that looks like, you know, looks like a nice road. I'm going to go cross it, right? So there's no such thing as a routine call, right? Because that sounded like, you know, routine, eh, he's not that art. And, you know, look at how it ended. And I ended up taking a phone call for him later on that day. you know, I went home, I came back in for my night shift the next day, and didn't know it.

Took a phone call for an overdose in a different town, neighboring town, but different town. And stayed on the line when the officer got there. You know, I was giving my instructions, you know, make sure they're breathing. He was still breathing. And somebody else had called for him, obviously. police officer walks in there's an open line i'd be a nosy right i'm staying on the phone i want to i want to kind of get an idea of what's going on so i'm going to listen in once the police arrive i'll listen in just for a second we're not you know we're not crazy busy the phones aren't ringing off the hook

or rolling over as we say um and i hear him in the background talking about the police officer he goes yeah he was in a car accident this morning early this morning and his uh his girlfriend and passed away. He flipped his car in, you know, the other town. And I'm like, no way. Like, that's both of them. I took the phone call for both of them. What is the chances of that happening? And I looked at my supervisor. I go, yeah, dude, I'm, I'm stepping out. I got to go for a walk just for a second, got to clear my head because there's, there's certain calls that just, they, and I don't know why, because it wasn't like, you know, he was, you know, we were doing CPR instructions on him. But he was, I mean, he was in a bad way.

For sure. But it just, it was like, wow, what are the chances that I take both of these phone calls? But it's one of those. I got to step out. I got to go for a walk. You know, at the time I smoked a cigarette, Dave. I'll be back. Did he end up surviving?

Did you find out? I don't know. I don't know. I know that they transported him to the hospital. Generally, that's not a bad sign. But with an overdose, a lot of times they'll push the Narcan and then they're up and they'll refuse medical. So they don't go to the hospital. So it's kind of like a left in limbo kind of thing.

When you hear so many of these calls day and day out, does it make you more cautious at home? Does it make you nervous? How does it make you feel? I mean, I don't want to say I'm nervous. I definitely pay attention more. It's hard. It's tough to turn it off, right? So like I, wild. I'm sitting in a car dealership getting my car work done, right? You know, it kills me that I'm paying somebody to do that now. But doing an oil change and I'm sitting in the waiting room waiting for my car to be done. And I'm texting my wife and I'm like, I'm having a hard time right now because I'm hyper vigilant.

I can hear everybody's conversation. I'm trying not to, but I hear this person who's on this business phone call. I hear this person who's talking to this. And I'm hypervigilant to everything going on. The door opens. I'm looking at them. Like, who's coming in? So, I mean, as far as turning it off when you're off of work,

I wouldn't say it makes you more nervous. I mean, you definitely pay attention more. You know, I can tell you what the car, three cars in front of us, doing. You know, hey, he just crossed over that line on the right and then he crossed over the line on the left. I don't want to be near that guy. Almost like a hyper-awareness kind of thing. But, I mean, I'll still go out. I'll do the same dumb stuff I did before, you know, just a little more cautiously. What about when you see, say, a cop car or a fire truck or an ambulance go by or hear the sirens, does that trigger anything? No, no, not really. I mean,

we're we're kind of uh isolated away from from like the the sirens and that kind of stuff at our agency but we uh you know i may i may look to see who it is if i know i'm i'm going to give him a little wave but uh you know it's it's not so much of uh like a like a triggering kind of thing it's more of uh you know hey there's something going on i'm curious i'm a little curious as to what, you know, what's going on, but, you know, I'm not going to freak out or, you know, have a panic attack over it or something along those lines. It's more of a guy. And my kids, I mean, my kids love, still love the fire trucks, love the ambulance, you know, there's an ambulance going by, oh my God, look. And they, I mean, they don't, they don't fully understand

what I do. They, they know, they know the important part. They know that I tell the police what to do. But, uh, yeah, my four-year-old's funny. She goes to me the other night, she goes, she goes, you're a police officer sometimes. And I'm like, mm, not, not really how that works, but we'll take it. Um, but so, so they're, they're going to, you know, they'll grow up around that, that, that kind of, you know, emergency services type of, uh, family. Because they all, they all know who we are. We talk to them every day. Do you guys form bonds with the officers, the firefighters like we see in TV, we see kind of like that banter back and forth with each other or just they know each other by first name when they were taking a call? Yeah, I mean, we definitely have our officers that we're tighter with.

I mean, we have officers that will come down. They'll come down to the Com Center. They'll visit us. They've got to pick up like a recording from a call or something like that. They'll come down. They'll pop down and stop in and, you know, conveniently time it. that, you know, it's right around breakfast time when the supervisors cooking breakfast for the shift. You know, and next thing, you know, they got a nice breakfast, you know, they take it to the, to go.

But we have our officers that were that we're closer with, and we try to open up, you know, one of the supervisors at our agency came up with a program. It's called Bridge the Gap, where basically police officers, come down and they get a little a little peek as to what we do you know so they'll have a little class and they'll come out and they'll actually put the headset on and they'll sit and they'll listen to to what we're what we're doing um so we i mean we have a we have a great relationship with with our local officers we have a great relationship with our sheriff's officers uh our prosecutors prosecutors detectors all that we we we're we're we're lucky in that aspect of things but um But yeah, I know officers, you can tell officers by their voice.

You know, this guy's marking up. It's like, yeah, all right, I know you are. I don't have any idea what you said on a radio because it sounded like your radio is inside your mouth. But I know who it was. So let's go again with that, you know. But yeah, and we have, I mean, we have ways to chat the officers, you know, through the, either through the cat or through a different software program that we have. We'll chat them.

You know, nothing bad. It's not, you know. But yeah, I mean, we have some officers. That guy, you know, I have a friend who's a police officer. I knew him in high school. And he ended up, I saw his name on the roster one day. I was like, no way. I didn't talk to him in years.

And I messaged him. I go, yo, is this you? And he was like, like yeah dude what and I'm like how do we get here man because we were both not super great kids in high school right like not big time trouble but you know those those little you know moments we'll call him and uh he was like how do we end up here yeah I don't know I have no idea but he and he actually uh he met his wife who was a was one of of my trainees. He met his wife at my house after we were going after going out over a call that

they had taken for an officer involved, an officer involved shooting that that they kind of were tore up over and, you know, sometimes sometimes you just got to kind of be around somebody that, uh, that knows what it's about. So I said, all right, listen, you're on training. I have a rule know, you know, I don't hang out with trainees outside of work. But, you know, after this call, come over to my house, I'll invite the other guy who took the other phone call from the same person. We'll get some pizza. We'll have some beers.

We'll sit down. We'll break it down. We'll talk about it. We'll go over it, you know, because training doesn't really end with, you know, we go home at the end of the day. If I'm your trainer, I'm also focused on. where you're at mentally. I want to know that you know how to handle what you're signing up for

because you may not know. You know, if somebody comes in, they don't know what we do. You know, what does a dispatcher do? What does 911 do? Or is it,

it's more of a, I call 911, I know 911 answers. That's it. It just works, right? If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Don't think too much on it. So that's, and that goes back to the training thing. That's a big thing. learning how to cope with the stuff we deal with. Because, I mean, dispatcher suicides do happen. There's been one or two, my agency before my time. But, yeah, it's a big thing.

We, you know, and it's a high-stress environment. So how do you cope with it if you've never dealt with, you know, emergency services before? How do you cope with this? You're not seeing it, but you're hearing it. Do you think the agency is good about providing resources to you? Yeah, I mean, our agency, I'm sure if somebody asked for assistance, you know, our agency would be, you know, receptive to it.

They would, you know, at least point you in the right direction or set you up with somebody to talk to, right? That's one way we're lucky with our management. that, you know, they are supportive. You know, we have, it's called the Apollo team in New Jersey. They'll go out after, like, a critical incident, and they'll speak with the first responders. And, you know, sometimes the dispatchers that dealt with it,

they'll be invited to go and deal with it, too. It really depends on what agency sets it up. But, I mean, like I said, that's on the big incidents. Maybe it's not a big incident. Maybe it's just a bunch of little incidents that's kind of got you got you in a weird spot, right? But, yeah, I mean, I can't give any instances of when somebody's had to reach out and, hey, listen, I need help. You know, I'm not in a good spot. I need some help.

I like to think our management would do that. And if not, you know, our union, you know, we're on the union president. I'll set it up. Let's go. Let's do it. You know, we take care of each other. We take care of our own. What's something you wish would change in the dispatcher community. It doesn't necessarily have to be in your organization, but it could be through our other ones that you've heard about on the job. I mean, I'd like to see, you know, we talked about a little bit before, you know, staffing. Luckily, our agency is not crazy affected by it. We, you know, minimally affected.

It's still a thing. We have, the profession has a relatively high turnover rate, right? Somebody's working in dispatch and they can work there for five years, right? They're making okay money at the time, right? You know, five years, you know, I'm okay. I've been here five years. I've put this much time in. do I want to start over somewhere else, that kind of thing.

And then that stress kind of creeps in, right? You're dealing with this every single day. We're dealing with emergencies. My life is other people's emergencies. You know, I could go work somewhere else for the same money and deal with much less stress, right? And like trainees, when somebody comes in, if they don't know what they're fully getting into, right? You got somebody that works there for a couple of months and they just can't handle it. And they cut out.

Totally get it, right? It's not a good, not a good fit for every single person. Anybody can do the job. But, you know, you need to make sure you're a good fit. Make sure you can handle it and handle everything outside of the job as well, right? But what hurts is when we're losing those people that have five years experience, 10 years experience, 15 years experience. where they're like, I got to go somewhere where I can either make more money or I can, you know, make the same money deal with way less stress. That's a big thing.

And I think that, you know, I mentioned before we're doing contract negotiations and stuff with our county. And we're really hopeful that, you know, they're going to help us kind of get to a point where it's like, okay, you know, we have all these disciplines, right? we're not, you know, police who are focused on just the police stuff, right? And obviously there's bleed over, right? I don't want to insult any police officers. They have knowledge of medical stuff as well as, you know, fire department stuff, you know. Ask the firemen. The cops are always there doing the fireman's job, putting a fire out before they get there.

And the firemen get all upset, right? I've been that guy. They have their general focus area. Fire department has their general focus area, EMS, has patient care. we have everything we got to have an idea of what law enforcement deals with we got to know how to do you know court systems and stuff like that to deal with warrants look up warrants fine warrants radio terminology because everything we do police side of things if somebody's getting arrested and it goes to court they're going to they're going to pull our recordings we're going to go to

court for it right um we have to give the medical instructions prior to any medical person personnel arriving. So we have that. Fire department. You call for a natural gas leak, right? We know to tell you, all right? Obviously, your house is, you got natural gas in your house. Get out. That's the obvious part, right? But don't touch any light switches. Don't open any windows. Go out the door, close the door behind you. Our department gets there. You got all your windows open in your house. How are they going to find it, right? Especially like carbon monoxide or something like that, are they going to find it? They're not going to find it. They're going to close the door. You're going to find out, oh, there was actually a CO leak at 3 o'clock in the morning when,

you know, you and your family wake up and they're, they got symptoms of CO poisoning. We have all these different disciplines that we have to kind of, not master, but we have to be aware of. So we're spread, spread out, you know, they say the thin gold line, right, represents dispatchers. And a lot of the sayings are, you know, we're the glue that holds it all together. And we are. And we deal with, you know, the communication between police, fire, EMS. Police have an update for fire. They're telling us, we're telling fire. They have an update for EMS, vice versa, you know. That's we're, we got our hands in a little bit of everything. Now, I've seen some debates, you know, amongst towns of having a civilian-based dispatch unit

versus, I guess, how they used to do it, having actual police officers work dispatch. What's your opinion on that and what are the pros and cons? I mean, the obvious one, right? If you have a police officer that's sit in a desk at headquarters, right? And it's not really, it doesn't really pertain to too much to my agency because we are, you know, a regional, you know, central dispatch agency for all these different towns. But that's a police officer that could be out on the street, patrolling or responding to calls, that kind of stuff. We're doing. We're doing. dedicated dispatchers. That's our job. That's our full, you know, our full focus is to handle this, right? We're not, you know, I'm the low guy on the shift. You know, I'm going

to headquarters or I'm the sergeant. I'm at headquarters because what happens if the sergeant's covering the desk, you know, dispatch desk, and they have to go respond out to the scene, right? Because they're a supervisor, you know, and what are they got to do? They got to send somebody in off the road, someone's got to take over the dispatch desk, you know. And, and, I mean, they could schedule an extra guy to cover the desk, maybe. I mean, as far as dispatching goes, I have seen dispatchers come in and they have had zero experience emergency services related, right? And they are some of the best dispatchers we have. You know, I've seen dispatchers come in. And they've seen dispatchers come that have, you know, history with, you know, writing with their fire department or their

volunteer ambulance or whatever. And they just, they can't, they can't make it through the training. So it's, it's really, I don't want to say not comparable. But, I mean, sometimes, sometimes have to do that, you know. But, I mean, I, I, I don't see a bearing necessarily. if you're a civilian, if you're a law enforcement. Obviously, they can do more stuff than we do. But same background checks.

I mean, the officer I was talking about before my buddy from high school, he had applied to work at our dispatch center. And I asked him, I go, why didn't you? I didn't pass a background check. But they gave you a gun and they let you go on the streets. What's going on here? Which the police department he works for does their background check, right? Totally thorough background check.

He's never, you know, never done anything, you know, criminally wrong, right? But I think that just speaks to how in-depth our background checks are for our dispatch center. I mean, I have your name and your date of birth and I got everything. I can find anything I want to know about you. And we want to make sure that that's not going to, you know, going to, you know, going to the wrong hands. You know, we're detectives behind the scenes, right? I mean, naming a date of birth, they're driving, they're driving this car.

Can you find them? You bet I can. Let's go. Game on. And that goes back to the everything is monitored. Don't just go running, you know, a president. It'd be bad. You know, you're going to get in trouble.

Someone's going to come knock on your door. I wonder if someone's ever, like, planted someone in dispatch, like, Back in the day before the heavy background tracks, like a team of bank robbers or something. Like something to get a little inside man action? Yeah, and divert people or divert responding, you know, officers or something like that. There you go. That'd be a good basis for a movie. There you go.

Yeah, don't, don't give too many ideas. Now, what do you think the movies or TV shows get wrong about 911 operators? Some of the stuff's accurate, right? Like we were talking before about the movie with Hallie Barry where, you know, the girls locked in the trunk and they're banging out the taillight, right? I would probably go for the same thing, bang out the taillight or turn the taillight off, something to indicate where you are, right? Because we're going to be trying to find you. Are we going to get up from our desk and respond out to the scene to come out and look for you? No, no, probably not.

I mean, we'll support from where we're at. I think a lot of it is dramatized big time. Because, I mean, the reality of what we do, right? It's real. Like, it's raw. It's real. You know, we're doing it. We got that adrenaline going.

I mean, we could be sitting at the desk. We could, you know, look at my watch and check my heart rate after I take a call or whatever. I could be up at, you know, 100 beats per minute like I was just running a lap. Just from the stress of it, the, you know, the adrenaline that I got pumping through my body. But it's hard to express that outwardly, like, for like a camera or something like that, right? Without, you know, getting too too morbid or whatever on a TV show. I tend to stay away from it. I said before, I mean, my wife loves the true guy.

stuff. She listens to it. I can't help but critique the call taker at the very beginning of the episode, even if they do everything right out. Yeah, okay. Yeah, I might ask, I probably wouldn't have gone that way. I would have gone this way instead, you know. Well, you know, a big one right now is the Idaho murders how one of the people in the house, you know, waited eight hours or close to that to call 911. Yeah, that's, I mean, that's weird. That's, that's something we're going to, I haven't, I haven't heard the calls for that or anything else. It's on my Netflix watch later list or whatever. It's a good series.

But I'm sure she's going to say, oh, it's on your watch later list. We're going to watch when we get home, right? It's something that, you know, one of the questions I ask is, do you have any idea when this happened, right? you know, not knowing any of the background or anything like that. You know, if somebody tells me it happened eight hours ago, you know, okay, why are you calling now?

What's, what happened, you know, between then and now, you know, we kind of read between the lines a little bit, sort of say, you know, I've taken a, took a call for a woman in one of our towns that said that there was a guy outside that shot himself with a, with a shotgun. right okay well where did he shoot himself right you think of shotgun right you got it's a longer gun unless you know you're here over here you know committing felonies with saw and us like we're back in the wild west right uh she go oh in the chest the chest okay where's the gun now you know start to investigate because like that doesn't make sense if i'm gonna you know not that it's impossible but that's not really a probable type of

of thing. It ended up being, it was a different agency that we didn't dispatch for at the time. So I got the pertinent information, stayed on the line, didn't get any of the outcome of it. I don't know if, you know, it was actually a shotgun. If it was a psych call, I don't know any of it. But like, we're always listening for that in between the lines type of stuff where, you know, something you're saying is not really adding up. You know, we're not going to, you know, sit here and be like, you know, typing in the notes, caller is lying to me, you know, that's not,

that's not what it's about. We're going to, we're going to document what you're telling us and let the inconsistencies kind of speak for themselves. And maybe, you know, something was a little off at the end, you know, hey, something's off or like, it's a big one with like swatting,

swatting type stuff, right? Not as big as it used to be, but still a thing. Well, with the streamers, that's pretty big right now. Is it? Yeah. Oh, boy. you call and you say something's going on here here here and here right i just killed my whole family blah blah blah blah blah we've taken enough swatting calls where we kind of have an idea of when something's

a swatting call you're calling from like a super you know ritzie neighborhood and saying that you know all this is going down and your next door neighbor who lives 100 feet away didn't call and report that they heard any of this or anything else right There's a couple of inconsistencies. We can kind of dig into that, right? Okay, what kind of cars are in the driveway? What color is the house? We can determine prior to anybody arriving and busting down anybody's door, hopefully.

Okay, yeah, this isn't adding up, you know, just still respond with caution, but, you know, this is probably going to be a swatting type call. What about fake school bomb threats? We get them. We've had them. You're not going to take any chances, though, right? So you still get the same response. We're still going to, you know, school board's going to do what the school board does, you know, for the safety of the children and that kind of stuff. Evacuate the building, you know, whatever.

Police are going to go right away, secure the scene, that kind of stuff. and then we're going to send, you know, everybody else that has to go out there, you know, bomb dog, whoever, whoever's got to go. Everything, until I confirm it's not an emergency or it's not real, it's real. Even after I confirm it's not real, it's still real until somebody gets there and visually confirms that it's not real. What are the hardest calls for you to take? I wouldn't say there's one really in particular.

there's there's different parts parts of a call that'll kind of get me right like like for example I took a I took a call for an unresponsive person right who was still breathing at the time so I'm giving my my EMD instructions and in the background I heard it's called it's called agonal breathing right which is, I don't know if you've ever heard the term, it's like a gasping kind of thing, right? So your body is going through the motions of breathing, but you're not breathing. Breasts are like super far apart. It sounds like you're gasping. I've taken hundreds of unresponsive, you know, calls.

I've taken, you know, CPR calls. I don't want to say, didn't get to me, but, you know, managed through. it, you know, hung up the phone at the end of it after, you know, somebody arrived and was able to move on to the next one. Two weeks prior to that, you know, my old man passed away. I heard that same noise from him. So it was, it was, it's, it creeps up on you, right? So that, hearing that through the phone, as soon as I hung up the phone, I said, I got to, I got to go. I got to go for my walk, right? I don't smoke cigarettes anymore. What am I going to do? I got to go for a walk.

So it's something that I've heard plenty of times before caught me that time. The, you know, people fighting with their kids calling 911. Like, I got kids. I'm not calling 911 on my kids. Kids may call 911 on me if they don't. No, I'm just kidding. It's, this is not what 911's for, right? You know, obviously if your kids being violent, they got, you know, a knife or they have a weapon or something like that and they're coming at you.

Yeah, please, please call 911. But you're having like an argument because your kid won't go to school. Don't call 911. You want to call the non-emergency number see if an officer's may be available to respond out. You know, okay. You know, talk to your kid, kind of try to set them on the right path. but I have a shortness in less patience for those kinds of calls. I still deal with them, right?

I'm still, everything's recorded. I'm still going to, you know, take your information. I'm going to let the officer. But I'm going to probably, you know, feel the type of way when I hang up with the phone. Like, you know, seriously, what are we doing here? What do you think is the strangest call you've ever received? Not my call. but I can't sit here and tell you about what it is to be a dispatcher and not tell this

this story right because that's a story that's a question we get asked all the time what's what's your what's your craziest call right we had one of those those people that that calls us frequently right you know the people we know by first name we know by the sound of their voice we know where you're at right she called one night and a little background on her right she's since passed away but uh she'd wake up you know middle-aged woman little older you know 60s maybe um and she would turn up all day she would just get blasted so she'd call you and she'd be slurred you know slur in her words you knew she was you knew she was drunk she called because there was somebody unresponsive and not breathing in her apartment.

Okay. All right. So call takers given CPR instructions. We got everybody going out there. The police get on scene. Five minutes, give or take, are call takers given CPR instructions on a pile of clothing. They got out there. There was no other person in the apartment.

It was a pile of clothes that, yeah. So, like, she's kind of what, you know, what's good, okay. That, I mean, that, that, that constitutes kind of crazy, kind of wild. But, I mean, as far as like emergent calls, I don't know, took a phone call for a, my trainee, rather, at the time, took a phone call for a, a fire that started in one of the towns we dispatched for that burnt down half of the, half of the town. And it was just a Spanish guy called.

He said, fire, fire, big fire, big fire. That was all we had. Like, you know, I didn't know that this two-minute phone call was going to turn into an incident that stretched, you know, two days and burned down like seven or eight buildings. Like. Now, how does it work with alarm? So, say, like, we have an alarm in here. If it goes off, they call.

us that the alarm company calls us and if they don't hear from us then they call I guess 9-1 or dispatch officers does that go to you first or does it go straight to the police station? Yeah, so like a burglar alarm, right? Yeah, fire alarm. They're not going to call you first. They're going to call me first. Okay. Yeah, it's a burglar alarm.

Yeah, burglar alarms. So we take all of our agencies we dispatch for, right? We take there are not emergency phone calls too. So if you're calling for like a records report during the day, we're going to get that phone call. We're going to then transfer you into records. So we're dealing with the emergency ones, and then we're dealing with, like, some of the administrative ones because people don't want to listen to the audits tell you, okay, for, you know, records hit option six. But it says to speak with the police officer, you can hit option zero right off the front, right off the jump, right?

So why not do that? I'm going to do that. I get a person right away. So one of the things involved with non-emergency lines is we'll take a call from the alarm company, right? and they'll say, hey, it's ADT, right? Just throwing a name out there. Calling it with a residential, commercial burglar alarm, whatever it is. Okay, and it'll ring through on that department's phone line, right?

So each department has its own line. So when we answer the phone, we know what town it is we're answering as. So we may switch it up. Take the address, take all the information, take, you know, like a, zone of activation if they can give it to us sometimes maybe. It's a little dispatcher joke because the alarm company never knows the zone. Oh, like where front door, back door or window. Zone 37.

Okay. Do you know what zone 37 is? No. Okay. All right. Zone 37 it is. We'll then dispatch out the police officer while, you know, and that's going in right away as soon as we have the address, burglar alarm zone.

We're sending it. What do you think that response time is from the time the alarm company calls to when a unit shows up? I mean, it depends, right? It depends on if you have somebody available, right? If they're tied up on an emergent call, you know, maybe that's going to take a little bit less priority than that. But, I mean, we have towns that are two square miles that we dispatch for as well. So, I mean, obviously, they're going to get a much faster response than, you know, somebody who's got, you know, it takes me 15 minutes to drive from one side of town to the other side of town.

to the other side of town with no traffic. But, I mean, it's still going to get the same kind of response as any other call. Because what if somebody you get there and it's actually being, you know, burglar-assed, then, you know, we may, you know, in that instance, get a call from somebody that's at that premise saying, hey, you know, my alarm went off. there's nothing going on. I just can't get in touch with my alarm company. Okay, well, reality, your alarm company probably called you,

asked you, you know, for your code and you didn't have it. So, you know, we're still going to send them, okay, no problem. We'll let the officers know they're still going to respond out there just to, just to verify. You know, everything is as everything is until somebody puts eyes on it to verify that it is not. Now what about on the iPhone when it dies? It says like you could still hit for emergency. How does that work?

Do you know? As far as like if there's like some sort of like reserve battery type of deal? I guess so. Maybe. Whenever I see it turn off or whatever it says you could still like double tap it or whatever for 911. Yeah, I know there's a thing where if you hit the side button like five times it gives you like a loud noise and it starts calling 911. Okay. I mean I don't I don't know.

so much technology-wise, you know, if I know that you can definitely call 911 from an out-of-service cell phone. And I've spoken to many two to three-year-old children that can verify that as well. And it's still, that's still, you're an out-of-service cell phone. I can't call you back. So I'm going to stay on the line with you until I have a good plot or I've talked to somebody and verified, hey, this is, you know, so-and-so. There's no emergency here. Okay, what's your address? We're still going to send them out just to check. Um, but I can't. can't call that back. And the only way you know that's an out-of-service phone, right? On our side of things, the area code is 9-1-1. That's it. That's the only way we know it's an out-of-service phone.

It still rings through just the same as it would if it was an in-service phone. Has AI changed a lot in your career for you guys? So we're actually, there's something coming for us with AI. I can't speak on it yet. I saw, you know, some presentations at our Nina conference last year that, that You know, you could do some pretty cool stuff with AI as it pertains to dispatching. A lot of stuff like training-related wise, right? So, like, they can actually use AI to supplement our training academy and, you know, do AI phone calls for the trainees. So they can sit there and feel the phone call, not real-time emergencies, right? And then critique it afterwards, right?

I think a lot of the AI has kind of leaned towards, you know, quality assurance type stuff, right? Because, like, you know, we're providing a service to the community, same as everybody else, right? So we're critiqued on what we're due. You know, they may sit back and listen to a phone call that we took two weeks ago, two months ago, and sit down and listen to what we did, okay, next time, do this. And it's not to not to jam anybody up unless, I mean, unless you were negligent in your job, in which case, you know, kind of, kind of get what you get at that point. But it's more of a tool that's going to be used to just make us as proficient as possible and make sure we're given that same quality across the board.

You know, critique each call. Hey, next time, you know, look at this, look at that, that kind of stuff. I mean, it was an hour-long presentation I sat through. I saw some cool stuff. I'm like, yeah, that would be cool. And I think it's something that's coming to our center pretty soon. do you think AI could ever replace a human operator or no absolutely not I thought the same because you need that it's like a podcaster you know you need that human interaction to de-escalate someone right and and I mean same thing with like going back to the turnover right

you've got somebody that's been down there for 10 15 20 years you know this is this is a a profession where experience matters, right? I may know something that somebody who's been there half the time doesn't know, you know, like a trick to try to get control of this caller, or I may pick up on something and, okay, well, I'm going to try this method to get their attention first. Then I'll move on to something else if it doesn't work. And it may work, whereas, you know, you learned in your book or in your class that you took, not that books and classes, you know, and continuing your education with dispatches is something that's not important because you never

stop learning, right? You really get like a list of things. Try this, try that, try this, try that. And you may go in that order and it may not work or it may take you until the third try to get it. And by the second try, they're already fed up with you. You know, are you even listening to me? You know, experience makes a difference. Yeah, well, order from, say, like, a pizza restaurant, and it sounds so real, it's like, but it's AI, and then you just get frustrated with them too. Maybe I've talked to AI and I haven't even known it yet. Yeah, you kind of, at first it sounds real, but then you kind of know it is, because then you'll repeat something and they don't pick up on it or there's certain things.

Okay. Yeah, I'm going to listen for that now. But obviously, a pizza restaurant's a lot different than, you know, a dispatcher, but. Right. Yeah, like, I'm technologically, right. I have, I have so much technology. I deal with at work, right? Like, PS5 is the most technology I got. I just learned what chat GPT was probably, you know, a couple months ago. That's great. But now there's so many, you know, you have Claude, you have Gemini, you have all these things. Yeah, I'll stick with chat GPT because like that's, I mean, I, too much of a good thing is not a good thing for me. It's overwhelming. I mean, it's overwhelming. How long have you been a dispatcher for so far?

I've been down there 10 years. It was 10 years in July. How long do you think you'll do it for? hopefully until I retire, you know. At this point, you know, retirement, we're still, you know, New Jersey classifies us as first responders in title. In reality, we're still in the same pension system as, you know, an administrative assistant. So I'll be down there until, you know, last time I checked 68. 68 is my retirement age.

Can I do this? this job for another 35 years, you know, I have to. Would I really, really like to see, you know, and I know Congress is working on something, something's in the works, right, you know, on a federal level. I really like to see, you know, same as police, 25 and out, you know, fire departments have a different pension system, but, I mean, just the environment we work in is, you know, it's sustainable. I've been there 10 years. I've seen, I counted it the other day. Five people retire, I think. One of them was our director. So he wasn't, he wasn't sit in the desk. He sat at the desk when he, you know, when it got busy. But our deputy director retired. Two supervisors

and one dispatcher who just retired like two weeks ago. That's it. That's it. That's a the only people I've seen retire. And we're talking people that had 30-something years on. So they've been there a long time. What do you think is the most important lesson your career has taught you so far? That's a good one. I would definitely go back to the never stop learning, right? There's always something that's evolving, some sort of new something coming out. You don't know everything. You'll never know everything, right? We have a continuing education that we have to keep up on at work. But that's kind of expanded to everything, right? So like, I don't know anything about, you know, back to the, you ever get, you know, doing anything outside of work, you know. I don't

know anything about electrical, but why not learn, right? So let me learn how to wire in this light switch. No ambulance needed in that one. But, you know, you're never going to know anything. Know everything. Don't stop learning. Don't stop keeping yourself open to learning new things, right? You, you're just losing an opportunity. If you learn it and you don't get it or it's not for you, cool.

You tried. You know, I don't want to live my life with any regrets, you know, and it's a, I'm not at work. I want to live, you know, not at work, you know, as long as I'm not beat up from working, you know, back-to-back, 16-hour shifts, you know, the two days before, then I want to nap. But, like, I want to get out. I want to do stuff, you know. Really, really, you know, is it a lesson so much as like a values kind of thing? You know, I just want to value my time, you know, value my time.

to do things, teach my kid things, right? Take them out, you know, go fossil hunting. Maybe stop at Amazon and pick up fossils to keep the fossil hunting interesting. Who knows? But, yeah, I mean, it's more of like a mantra. What's the guy from my credo? It's my credo. Well, I appreciate you coming on the show today.

This was an awesome interview. I really enjoyed it. Yeah, man, thanks for having me. Again, hopefully this, you know, open some eyes. to, you know, kind of what we deal with down at dispatch, you know, and give a little peek in. You know, I'm sure any officers that are watching, if they reach out to their dispatch agencies and they want to go down there and check it out, I'm sure they'd be open to it too. We like visitors.

We like food. Stop by with food. Stop by with coffee. Come on down. That's awesome, Ben. Thank you. Thanks.