It’s National Public Safety Telecommunicators week, an annual week to recognize the efforts of the emergency dispatchers responsible for making sure that emergency services know where they need to go and have the info they need to do their job safely.
Belleville’s police force relies on a team of capable dispatchers to connect them to calls for help. These dedicated workers operate out of the Belleville Police Station and are tasked with not only telling police where the emergency is, but also providing them with as much additional information about what is happening as they can to prepare the responding officers before they arrive.
The job of a police dispatcher is a balancing act and requires multitasking, watching real time maps with the marked locations of emergency calls and trackers on police vehicles, monitoring which officers are available to respond, finding information in the database that could help on the current call, relaying information to officers and taking emergency calls from those in need.
One of the senior dispatchers, Cindy McLaughlin, has worked at multiple departments for over 20 combined years, with the last eight of them in Belleville. She said that to be a dispatcher, you have to be able to work well under pressure.
“It’s that job that you love coming in to. It’s not one that I sit at home and think, oh, no, I gotta go to work. I still really love the job, like I said, is really rewarding. Being able to help out your community, help out people when they’re in crisis,” said McLaughlin.
Belleville police’s dispatch centre is training some new dispatchers to add to the team. Kallista Davis is one of the new recruits being trained, and she said she’s always wanted to work in emergency response.
“I thought in the past about being a paramedic, or maybe a nurse and working in the emergency room, or even a police officer,” said Davis “I studied psychology and I originally thought, oh, maybe I’ll get into social work, but I sort of changed my path along the way. And here I am now.”
National Public Safety Telecommunicators week runs until April 22 this year. It is traditionally held during the second week of April each year.
