By Liliana Fannin
The Fresno Bee
FRESNO, Calif. — It’s the calls for help when a child is drowning that stay with Matt Mendes, a Fresno County Sheriff’s Office 911 dispatcher who has worked his way up to supervisor.
Dispatchers rarely get closure after sending an officer to a scene, he said.
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“We have to hear the screams and the cries for help. We have to make up the scenarios in our heads,” Mendes said. “I do think that we have it tough. We may not see the bodies, but we still have to hear it.”
Fresno’s law enforcement agencies, along with others across the country, have struggled to keep positions filled for the stressful job that often comes with low pay and difficult hours, impacting call answer times. Both centers have made progress in answering 911 calls faster, but still fall below the state mandate to answer 90% of 911 calls within 15 seconds, The Bee recently reported.
Dispatchers for the Fresno Police Department and the County Sheriff’s Office take calls from residents experiencing everything from shootings to mental health crises, domestic violence and robberies.
“Anything you can think of, somebody in here has answered that call,” Jaime Fahlsing, emergency service dispatch manager for Fresno PD, told The Bee.
Fahlsing worked as a dispatcher in Fresno for over 10 years before becoming a supervisor. She will never forget when a mother couldn’t find her son and later called back to report he had committed suicide.
Another that has stayed with her is when a woman called to report her rapist as the sexual assault was taking place.
“There is one dispatcher behind everything. The first, first responders is what we like to say,” she said.
The job can take a mental toll, Fahlsing and Mendes say.
Mendes leans on and talks with friends and coworkers at the Sheriff’s Office to cope and find closure, he said.
Fahlsing said she and many dispatchers become desensitized to the trauma they hear on a daily basis.
Although others can realize the job is not for them after an extensive training process that can take up to a year. “We try to help them through that,” Fahlsing said.
But still, the traumatic calls and late-night shifts are not sustainable for everyone. “And we respect that, and then they go find another job,” Fahlsing said.
For dispatchers who do choose to stay in the job, Fresno PD officials describe a change in culture over the past 10 years from a “tough it out” mentality to normalizing emotional reactions and support.
“When I first started in dispatch, it was the same mentality as law enforcement, in general,” Fahlsing said. “If you can’t handle it, get out, and that was okay back then. But we’ve changed that as an industry, because the stuff that we’re hearing is not normal.”
A focus has been placed on managing emotional tolls that come with the job rather than compressing it and moving on, Fahlsing said.
Fresno PD dispatchers have access to a wellness center they can visit confidentially at any time without supervisor approval to receive services like counseling and other related services. Therapy dogs are brought in twice a month.
When a critical incident involving multiple people across the police department, starting at dispatch, occurs, a social worker will often guide a debriefing conversation with everyone involved to help process emotions, Deputy Police Chief Burke Farrah told The Bee.
“Those debriefings, dispatchers attend and get a lot of closure from the events, and you will see some agencies that still do not include their dispatchers in those debriefings,” Fahlsing said. “It’s no fault to them, really. We’ve just been a voice and been asking for it, and our department is really great at recognizing us. They really support dispatch.”
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