I have learned that The Ipswich Public Safety Dispatch Center is being threatened and in danger of being shut down thus closing our police station.
The Ipswich Dispatch Center is staffed by highly qualified, trained and dedicated men and women. The idea of outsourcing the dispatching of essential emergency calls for services such as police, fire and emergency medical call is a ludicrous idea at best.
The Town of Ipswich steered away from this notion years ago, as did many other communities when the Essex County Regional Dispatch Center was created…
Every 911 operator has that call that will
demand more of them than usual … this was mine.
I was the second 911 operator she had spoken with that
morning. Only six minutes into our phone conversation on that 911 line, I had
determined that she very likely had paranoid schizophrenia with a totally
unhealthy splash of “watched one too many fictional espionage dramas.” She was
a chaotic ball of nervous energy going on incessantly about the electronic bugs
in her apartment (and in her brain), the neighbors to the immediate left of her
building that were harassing her by staring into her windows at night, and all
the reasons why she didn’t trust law enforcement to begin with. I tried to
sound gentle and reassuring even as I recognized what I was dealing with…
12PM – The Big Lead // GUEST: Former Sheriff John Urquhart defends the 911 dispatcher on Sherman’s wife’s call, explains procedure and training // Gov. Inslee says everything is climate change // Twitter upset with us for airing 911 call
On April 20 at approximately 11 a.m. a 73-year-old woman fell at her home on County Road 109 (Oakland Hills). After falling she was able to get herself to her cell phone and placed a call to 911. Upon making contact with the dispatch center for American Medical Response (AMR) she was asked a few questions. The communicator then transferred her call to a nurse who proceeded to ask her more questions. This nurse determined the call to be non-emergency in nature and dispatched an AMR basic life support unit to her location. Following is a timeline of the 911 call as received via a public records request from Sumter County…
No matter the agency, we all have the officer that complains that
we are picking on them. We all know it’s mainly because it’s in their beat or
sector or they are the closest unit. It’s also because we are too busy with pending calls to care if their
feelings are hurt. A few of us make these officers feel our wrath by sending
them from one side of town to the other, fielding every report under the sun.
How many of us are envisioning the officer we want to do that to?
Ultimately, we all want every one of our officers to go home, and
we all want to catch the bad guy and be the best dispatcher we can be for our
residents, right? …
We Speak Dispatch is a group of 911 professionals discussing topics from the headlines, topics that are fun and interesting, topics that you care about. Our engaging conversations are designed to inspire more conversations, so if you have a topic you’d like to see discussed let us know. Thank you to all 911 dispatchers..
Learn about current efforts to continue to protect the 4.9 GHz Band for public safety as well as recent filings, key decisions impacting these efforts, and how you can support PSSA’s initiative to protect the 4.9 GHz band for public safety.
