Work Text:
1. The One Thing EVERYONE gets wrong:
“911, what is your emergency?” No. No, no, no, no no. “911, what is the address of your emergency?” Unless you say something that suggests you need CPR instructions right then, the first thing a 911 call taker wants to know is where. This is even more true now that most calls are on cell phones.
But you can track cell phone locations, right?
Kiiiinda? Not fast enough to do a whole lot of good if someone's bleeding out. You have to call the cell company and articulate your exigent circumstances, and they'll ping it off the available cell towers and triangulate to a range. If you're in a metropolitan area, they can get to within a few blocks. If you're in Forks, Washington or anywhere Scully and Mulder are likely to show up, there may be only one tower within range, and then your ping will get you a circle ten miles in diameter. If you want to hack the GPS unit on a phone you need to pull that magic technology and magic red tape cutting from whatever canon you're working with.
2. Another useful thing to keep in mind:
The whole system is newer than you think. 911 started being used in selected areas in 1968, but it wasn't official nationwide until the 80's, and in 1989 less than half the country used it. So. Writing Stranger Things fic? 911 is brand-spankin' new if it's there at all. Writing X-Men fic? If Charles Xavier still has hair, you don't have 911 yet.
3. So, 911 operators are really trained in medical stuff, right?
Eh. Better than a lifeguard, not as good as an RN, especially if they're just starting out. Emergency Medical Dispatch certification is a thing, but you're not getting trained in medicine; you're getting trained in how to use a flow-chart-based system of scripted questions. If you ask the questions out of order, or reword them, or ask extra questions, you will get dinged by the quality assurance gremlins. For many, though not all, centers, the quality assurance gremlins live in a different state and communicate with your supervisors once a week or so.
You know what your 911 people are brilliant about, though? Geography. “I turned off Highway Umpteen fifteen minutes ago and there's a Taco Time and a Chevron?” Got it. “about half a mile past where the Piggly Wiggly used to be and now it's a bowling alley?” Sure thing, were you going east or west? “We were hiking by Lake Milkweed and now we're lost?” If you're on a dirt path it's probably the Blair Witch memorial trail, and if it's gravel it's the BLM access road. “We're at the Church of the Quivering Brethren's summer camp?” That's actually Valley Hills County, rather than Townsville, let me transfer you. Lots of this stuff is in computer programs, of course, but the computer maps get updated monthly and they are probably still wrong. A trainee 911 operator will go on driving tours of their service area, study maps, take quizzes, and then do it all again next quarter if the training budget is in good shape (it probably isn't really.) The center I have the most experience with has a Geography Committee.
4. Isn't a 911 operator always a dispatcher?
Often, but not always. EMD training is expensive, and you need five employees for every seat you're keeping warm 24/7. (You probably have four point seven-five of them and lots of mandatory overtime unless you got lucky recently.) It's pretty common for several agencies in a region to all contract with one center to answer and transfer emergency calls. It's set up state by state and region by region, so there's a lot of variety in exactly how it works. If you call 911 in Smallville, you might get answered by one of the two dispatchers on-deck in the Police department, who will transfer you to the Metropolis regional center if it turns out you're having a meteor-induced stroke, because Metropolis is trained in the Meteor protocol and anyway Smallville Regional Fire Protection District contracts with Metropolis, not Smallville PD, for their dispatch services. Alternatively, if you call 911 in Smallville, you might get the phone answered by someone in Metropolis, who will ask you where you are and what's going on and then transfer you to one of the two dispatchers in Smallville when it turns out someone's trying to rob the bank with a meteor gun again.
5. How long does it take to get trained up?
Twelve weeks or so for the basics, with more added on depending on how many agencies you have to keep track of and how much time they can schedule for training vs. putting you on the Ops floor for the parts you already know how to do.. I know of one regional center where it's 18 months to get fully trained, and another one that's three years, but that's really on the outside.
Being a newbie is really expensive for the department. There are state and national certifications you have to get, plus a huge expense in background investigations and security checks even before you hire on. If you're on the job for less than two years before doing something else, it's probably because you weren't good at it. (This happens a lot, because it is a hard job. A lot of former 911 trainees end up elsewhere in the civilian side of public safety.)
Even if you're one of four dispatchers for Boonie County and are related to half the Sheriff's department, 911 is not a “find yourself after college” kind of job and all your relatives in Emergency Services will warn you. (Need a “find yourself after college job” in public safety to stick a canon woobie into? Make them a Records Clerk, a Volunteer Coordinator, an Assistant Public Information Officer, or a Custodian, depending on where you need them to show up.)
6. Which of my beloved canon genius characters should I put in 911/dispatch for my Emergency Services AU?
You probably don't want to make your genius a dispatcher, to be honest. Geniuses tend to wash out fast. They get bored and start trying to improve the medical scripts and eaten by Quality Assurance Gremlins. Or they start second-guessing themselves on the finer points of Boonie County Sheriff's Department dispatch criteria and freeze. Or they stress out too much in a job where you almost never, ever find out what happened to the guy who got hit with the meteor gun once the medics took him away. Michelangelo would make a better dispatcher than Donatello. Applejack would make a better dispatcher than Twilight Sparkle. Thor would make a better dispatcher than Loki. You can't be stupid, but you do have to be a quick decision-maker and resilient to boot.
However, there absolutely is a place for your tech genius at the 911 center; it's just not on the phones. A single 911 call will involve:
• The automated phone system, which also pulls location information and dumps it into...
• The Computer Aided Dispatch system (CAD), which may or may not play nicely with...
• The Records Management system (RMS) where the agency keeps previous report numbers, information about where the lockbox in the apartment complex is, the names and personal info of everyone the cops have talked to, ever, etc.
• The logging recorder that records all the 911 phone lines and tags them with date/time, operator number, and usually other stuff like the phone number as well. The fancy new ones most centers can't afford also talk to CAD and tag them with the police case number.
• Meanwhile, it's a medical call, so you're also dealing with your EMD protocols, which are also supposed to filter information into CAD automatically.
• Furthermore, if you're dispatching, you're also dealing with the radio system, which might or might not talk directly to CAD,
• and that's leaving out all the other bits and pieces, each one from a different vendor, for things like text-to-911, or the screamer tags stuck in the packet of cash the bank robber just ran off with, or the widgets that try to gather more information about the cell phone that just pinged off a cell tower somewhere outside Forks, or the widget that's supposed to forward information from CAD to the pagers of the Smallville Rural Fire Protection District, the language translation service...
All of which to say, your resident tech genius absolutely has a place in the 911 center and is probably even more overworked than the dispatchers.
7. I've got a brilliant idea for a plot set IN a 911 center. What's a good place to put my villain?
Well, bent cops and jerkwad firefighters/EMTs would all have an excuse to show up, hang out, date/threaten your woobie, etc. A Mean Girls style queen bee would almost certainly be a Lead Worker and/or Training Coach. (Lead workers can act as supervisors under certain circumstances and often have side projects such as editing/writing training manuals or keeping CAD location information up to date.) It is not unheard of for a Dispatcher with friends or family on the wrong side of the law to call them ahead of time and tip them off when the cops are on the way. (They get fired if that happens and they get caught. Immediately.)
If you want to get really ambitious and have a giant conspiracy-type thing, the State Office of Emergency Management collects all the tax funds for 911 centers and distributes them, minus the costs of running the Office of Emergency Management, the State training academies, and… and a surprisingly large number of other things. The percentage of 911 tax that doesn't make it out to the 911 centers is a source of contention for pretty much everyone trying to work a 911 center and the OEM is a pretty good place to put a Kingpin type.
8. Can you give me some cool-sounding acronyms and things so I sound like I know what I'm talking about?
OK, let's make alphabet soup:
PSAP – Public Service Answering Point - the official name for a 911 call center and a good thing to google if you want to know about how they do things in any particular place.
ANI-ALI – Automatic number/Location Identification – when you call 911, the phone number and (theoretically) your location get dumped into the call screen automatically
EMD – as previously mentioned, Emergency Medical Dispatch. There are a number of different options for the dispatch protocols, but if you're in Smallville or similar, the cheap ones are from:
APCO – the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials. Together with NENA (National Emergency Number Association), APCO is the professional organization that the 911 Director and at least some of the other leadership staff belong to. The State APCO will hold an annual awards ceremony, among other things.
DPSST – Department of Public Safety Standards and Training. Runs the State Academy and Certification process and is also in charge of making sure that people who get fired for being evil don't get rehired at other agencies.
TTY – teletype: being supplanted by text-to-911 but still a thing.
AVL – Automatic Vehicle Location – GPS units in responder vehicles that are supposed to update automatically in CAD. Mostly a bigger-city kind of thing at this point.
MDC – mobile dispatch computer. Lives in the responders' vehicle and is how they can see the outstanding calls, etc. Most MDCs have a text messaging function and in larger, busier agencies a lot of communication between the responders and the dispatcher happens via MDC rather than over the radio. Dispatchers and phone operators will also use the MDCs to communicate with each other, in centers where they're not right next to each other.
CJIS and LEDS - Criminal Justice Information System and Law Enforcement Data System. National databases for looking up warrants, stolen vehicle information, arrest histories, etc etc. Access to CJIS and LEDS data is very tightly controlled and any non-public safety person coming into a place where they might see computers with CJIS data will have to sign a form, have at least a rudimentary background check, and/or be accompanied by staff at all times.
Toning Out – how you make sure your radio broadcasts are going to the right place: the receivers at the Stations are set to come alive only if they first hear a set of specific digital tones. They sound like long beeps at the beginning of your transmission.
CENS – Community Emergency Notification System, or “reverse 911.” For things like evacuation alerts or, alternatively, shelter-in-place alerts if there's something going on that people shouldn't come out into.
9. What's some stuff I can safely make up and sound halfway believable?
A lot of 911 administration happens at the State level, so if you care a lot about accuracy and have a particular state in mind, go looking for your state's DPSST or APCO website. With that said, you have quite a bit of leeway in terms of:
Where your call center is – Behind the front desk of the police station? In a basement under Public Works? In its own building next to Fire Logistics? A lack of natural light is more common than not, but it really varies.
What shifts people work: workdays run from 8-15 hours, three to five days a week with an extra half shift of mandatory overtime on my Sunday, dammit.
What dispatchers wear – some places have civilian uniforms (polo shirts and slacks, usually) some have dress codes, some have one plaintive manager wishing fruitlessly that people would not wear pajama bottoms to work except at the annual Christmas Eve pajama party.
On a similar continuum, you can be super strict about what people are allowed to do on a slow night, or you can have multiple big-screen TV's set up with the sound off all around the center, tuned into CNN, the Home& Garden Channel, Cartoon Network, and Animal Planet, people with their dogs asleep next to them, and people reading books, assembling puzzles, or starting the occasional Nerf war. The one thing nobody allows is personal cell phone use on the floor, because that violates laws about access to CJIS data.
I don't know what the tradition is at your call center when someone delivers a baby over the phone, but I know there is one. Maybe you get a small, tasteful(ish) stork lapel pin. Maybe you have to buy everyone pizza. Maybe there are balloons. Maybe the new family gets a copy of the call recording and a onesie with a headset printed on it.
10. What are some other 911 things?
All special occasions are celebrated with food. All. Of. Them. The Plague changed this only in that the food is now individually wrapped.
The rumor mill is just as busy as you would expect from people who literally make a living dealing with other people's drama.
We know all our local “frequent fliers” by name and have pretty friendly relationships with most of them. Radios in your teeth giving you problems? Sorry to hear that, Mozz, but I missed you last week and it's good to hear your voice.
Also, every dispatcher or former dispatcher I have ever talked to says “Copy,” instead of “OK,” or “Got it,” or “NOW I know what you're talking about.” Pretty much anywhere a military type would say “Roger,” they say “copy.”
Annnnd… that’s all that occurs to me at the moment. I’m open to questions from the floor if you’ve got something specific you want to know.