Behind the Scenes at Police Dispatch

You have to understand that in Elk Grove Police Department’s Citizens’ Academy, they’re telling us just what they want us to know.  Each week it’s another one or two topics, introduced by the ever-ebullient Officer Jason Jacobo and served up on a platter by whatever cop is taking the lead on that particular unit.  They each come with Power Point Presentations, and the sessions include time for questions.  However, it’s not like a press conference where some unruly reporter tries to filter out the official BS to get a nugget of truth.

Still, there’s a story to tell, a narrative being driven:  The relationship between cops and community has long been fraught with bad feeling—on both sides. The Elk Grove Police Department would like to change that.  This is, I believe, the raison d’etre behind the Citizens’ Academy. They want us to know that cops are human, that their Thin Blue Line does indeed bleed red. Yet the Us-and-Them mentality has become so institutionalized that it generates plenty of knee-jerk responses, from us, and—I learned last week—from the police as well.

A couple of weeks ago, Dispatchers Katie Miller and Shary Merten did a tandem presentation on the Dispatch-Communications Unit; last week, I spent three hours sitting next to Dispatcher Jennifer Noritake, listening and watching as she handled her calls.  Come along and see what you think: 

It’s a gray, cold day, just beginning to rain, when I present myself to the Service Desk of the police department.  The response from the man behind the desk is equally gray and cold.  Okay, I get it.  This is a Very Serious Place.  Still it would be nice if the greeting for John or Jane Q Public was more than you’re bothering me for what and who are you again?

I’m told to sit and wait.  I obey.  Soon a bespectacled young Asian woman walks up to me, offering a soft handshake and her first name, Jennifer.  She leads me wordlessly through a labyrinthine series of corridors.  At the third locked door, we are admitted to the inner sanctum of the Dispatch Center.  It’s a good-sized room with big-screen TVs on each wall.  Two of them are showing the Food Channel’s Iron Chef, with sound off and dialogue superimposed on the screen.  Another screen shows real-time video from the Department’s on-site cameras.  One of those is the holding cell, and (local color) Jennifer laughs as she tells me that last week they watched a drunk woman in there throwing up.  

The Dispatchers themselves are seated at huge, ergonomically-designed desk stations, six in all.  There are five monitors at each console, along with a foot pedal that can activate the radio.  Dispatch is, we’ve been told, fast-moving, requiring not only speed but the ability to multi-task.  Jennifer runs through the purpose of each of the screens.  The first three show the radio and computer-assisted dispatch systems. The fourth has the intranet, which allows her to pull up information from the California Law Enforcement Telecommunication System (CLETS) and a mapping program that enables her to “see” a crime scene and track where the officers are.  The far right monitor shows relevant phone lines and numbers. 

We learned all this in class.  We also learned—thank you, PowerPoint—that Dispatch is the conduit between the public and the officers.  Their responsibilities, in order of importance, are officer safety, citizen safety and information facilitation.  That, it seems to me, is crucial to remember.  While we (the citizens) think their main job is to protect and serve us, they (the cops) see their main job as to go home to their families at night.  That’s a mantra they keep repeating at the Citizens’ Academy.  It explains a lot, I think, about the actions of the police—including such things as meeting force with superior force, shooting when they feel seriously threatened, even using a stun gun rather than pepper spray. 

None of that is happening tonight in Elk Grove, however, where it’s raining quite hard.  Evidently crime in our city is weather-related: When it’s bad outside, the call load is low.  Jennifer and I sit side by side, facing the monitors, waiting for action.   There is little, just some hangup calls—“pocket calls,” they term them.  We sit and stare.  I feel like we’re on a bad blind date at a boring movie, both just trying to make the best of it.

Then, finally, there is some phone activity about a kid who is being taken to Juvenile Hall.  The cops talk in code so I can’t really tell what the situation is. Jennifer scrolls through the CLETs to run some names.   I’m struck by how the mug shots offer a time-lapse look at someone’s life.  Here he is at 16, young and scared; here he is at 18, hardened after a couple of years in Youth Authority.  Here he is at 25, meth-skinny with wild hair. 

A call comes in from the mother of the kid who was arrested.  She’s on the EGPD phone at the front door, standing in the rain.  She wants to know where her kid is.  She isn’t uncivil; she’s just a mom who wants to find her child.  The best Jennifer can do is contact the arresting officer to go out and talk to the mother.  He refuses, however, telling Jennifer to get the mom’s number and he’ll call her. According to Jennifer, the cop will call rather than go to the door because he’s apprehensive that the mom will create a scene. 

I think to myself that the woman doesn’t sound like she wants to make a scene; she sounds like she wants to know where her kid is and why.  But what do I know?  Maybe there’s a history with this woman that the cop knows about.  Later, when the officer calls the woman, he gets no answer, which Jennifer grumbles is typical.

The next call comes from a father, also already at the police station, wanting to report that his son has been molested by another kid.  Although the father has already been told by another dispatcher to come into the PD to file a complaint, Jennifer leads him through his story once more. It’s somewhat convoluted and as it relates sexual molestation by a teenager, it’s not an easy story to tell.

The calm questions dispatchers ask—race, clothing, age—we’ve been told, sometimes provoke anger on the part of the public:  I’m reporting a crime and you’re calmly asking me what kind of pants the suspect was wearing?  There’s a method and meaning to these questions, though, and even as they’re asking them, the dispatcher has sent officers to the scene.  Still, it’s easy to see why these seemingly mundane questions in the urgency of the moment can create ill will on the part of the public.

 When Jennifer learns that the son has not accompanied his father to the police station, however, she stops. You can’t make the complaint without him, Jennifer tells the father; your son has to be present.  There is some discussion about why—officers have to get the information directly from the victim.  Well, what if I had a two-year-old that didn’t talk yet, the father asks.  The officers would still have to see him in person. 

The father is annoyed. He’s driven from Wilton at the direction of another dispatcher, on what he’s now being told is a useless errand.  He argues a bit—the kid is traumatized enough as it is, his therapist said they shouldn’t talk to him about it—but Jennifer is adamant.  No kid, no complaint.  Finally, she calls an officer to come out and talk to the father, and that is the end of that situation. 

She and the other dispatchers think it’s laughable that the father came in without the son to make the report.  This irks me.  I don’t think I’d know I had to bring my child in, I tell her.  She is unmoved and, as cops too often do when faced with the public’s questions, cites the law and the rulebook.  What about the case of a teacher or doctor who is mandated by law to report abuse? I ask.  They can make the report without the child being present.  Yes, but the cops would still go out to the house to see the victim in person.  I’m not sure why that couldn’t be done in this case, but I keep quiet.

I think about something Jennifer told me earlier in the night: that three officers had been sent to a call instead of one, because the house in question stood right next to the one where, a few weeks ago, an EGPD officer shot an unarmed suspect who was in the back of a patrol car. The assumption was that there would be hostility to the cops in such a neighborhood.  The need to protect themselves—to go home to their families—demanded from their perspective a show of force.  And the reaction from that neighborhood?  Perhaps just that the cops are overreacting again.

What will it take to erase the Us and Them mentality from our interactions with law enforcement?  A bit of grace and a lot of understanding on both our parts.  I leave the Dispatch unit thinking that they could use a little of each.