August 3, 2006

Village dispatchers, such as Norma Lewis, have deep connections to the community that help them do their jobs. This could change if the police department cuts costs by going to a centralized dispatch system.

By Virgil Hervey

A hostage situation unfolds in a downtown store. A dog is attacked by a swarm of bees. A young boy is frightened by his parents’ fighting, and is hiding with his 3-year-old sister in another room. These are all situations that came to Yellow Springs Police Dispatcher Norma Lewis’s mind at a recent interview as the exciting moments in her 27 years on the job. In each situation, she took the call, relayed the information to the officers on duty, and stayed on the line to help in any way she could.

In the case of the hostage taker, Lewis obtained the floor plans for the building and informed the officers on the scene of their options to gain entry. When the owner called for help getting the bees off her dog, Lewis had the presence of mind to call the Village crew, because she knew they would have bee spray. She also advised the responding officers to hose the dog with water. When the frightened child called about his parents, she stayed on the line until she heard the officers gain entry. Later, she felt it important to tell the child he had done the right thing, she said.

Day in the life of a dispatcher
According to Lewis, a day in the life of a local police dispatcher consists of taking requests for welfare checks on senior citizens, responding to visitors at the police department window, taking fines and bond money, and giving information in the absence of the part-time court clerk, issuing bicycle tags, taking electric service payments after hours so service can be reconnected, issuing copies of police reports, taking information from couples who would like to be married by the Village Mayor, giving out general information to callers who don’t know where else to ask, taking emergency calls over the phone and at the window, and dispatching officers.

In addition to dealing with her own department, she has frequent contact with Miami Township Fire-Rescue, the Greene County Sheriff’s office, the Ohio State Patrol, and state park rangers, as well as a host of other local police departments.

“It helps to be a multi-tasker,” she said. She keeps an ear on the radio while talking on the phone and helping people at the window, at the same time that she is sorting through the radio chatter of other police departments to determine which calls are hers.

A full-time dispatcher for her entire career, Lewis has been on the day watch (7 a.m.–3 p.m.) for the last 12 years, and she expects to retire in May, 2007. There are currently two full-time and five part-time dispatchers. At one time, according to Larry Campbell, the other full-time dispatcher, who works the 3 to 11 p.m. shift, there were four full-timers, but when Ann Burden left in the mid ’90s to take another job, her spot was filled with part-time employees, Campbell said.

The fact that the Village is considering participation in a proposed county-wide central dispatch system to save money weighs heavily on both Lewis and Campbell. According to Lewis, Lisa Crosswhite, another long-time dispatcher, left at the beginning of July because she was afraid of losing her job if the department goes to a central dispatching system. Her full-time position will not be filled with another full-timer either, Lewis said.

Lewis, who volunteers at the Friends Care Center, said she sees herself as a liaison to the seniors in the village. In addition to the normal welfare checks from concerned relatives, she frequently gets calls from the Senior Center, inquiring about someone they have not seen in awhile. Having lived her entire life in Yellow Springs, Lewis said the call she dreads the most is when something happens to someone she knows. In the case of a death, she calls the squad to respond, then notifies the next of kin. Frequently the names of the people to contact are stored in her head. She thinks the local touch is important and fears that it will be lost if Yellow Springs opts to become part of a county-wide central dispatch service.

“I could take a job over in Fairborn and sit at the radio with a map, and do an adequate job,” she said. “But to me adequate isn’t good enough. When I get a call here, I can tell you what color the house is.”

Campbell, who worked for the Village as an electrical lineman for nine years and a patrol officer for 15 years, has been a dispatcher since 1992. Currently living in Enon, he resided in Yellow Springs for many years and still has family in town. He has coached football at all stages, from pee wee to high school, and has watched many young men grow up in the village. He feels he has an investment in Yellow Springs, he said.

Regarding the personal touch, he said, “I can recognize people’s voices on the phone. If some elderly person calls and says there’s a fire in the old Berry house, I know where it’s at.”

Possible loss of local dispatch
He said the town has seen a lot of changes since he first began working in Yellow Springs, mostly due to the young people leaving town and waning support from Vernay. He sees the demise of local dispatching as part of the overall picture.

“Once the dispatch goes, where does it stop?” he asked. “Soon we’ll have the Sheriff’s Department patrolling our streets.”

He pointed out that the department is already two police officers short. Since he was interviewed, Officer Al Pierce retired at the end of June, 2006.

Lisa Crosswhite said that she had quit her position as a dispatcher in the Village to take a similar job with the Ohio State Patrol (OSP) in Xenia, because she thought her position was about to be eliminated in a move to either a central dispatch system, or Xenia’s current system. Crosswhite had been a local dispatcher for 16 years. She took the OSP job at a loss in pay, she said, because it is part of the same retirement system and she needed the job security. She has 14 years before she is eligible to retire. According to Crosswhite, the end of local dispatching is a certainty, even if the new central dispatching system never comes to be.

“We were always told they can flip a switch and send us down to Xenia,” she said. “Xenia is already set up to take over dispatching for Yellow Springs.”

Crosswhite, who lives across from Yellow Springs High School, coaches cheerleading, and her husband, Jerome, coaches football. She said she is saddened not only by the change in her own situation, but by the loss to the villagers, if local dispatching goes. Once she was on duty when a Yellow Springs police cruiser was stolen, she said, and when the description came over the wire, she immediately recognized the perpetrator as a village resident and was able to give the officers a name.

According to Crosswhite, the Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) system that a central dispatcher would rely on needs an exact address of a location for an officer to respond. She said that virtually no one in town, including her, knows the addresses of the individual buildings on the Antioch Campus. But if someone reports an incident at Birch Hall, all of the local dispatchers and police officers know exactly where that is.

Currently Yellow Springs 911 calls are handled through Xenia, according to Yellow Springs Police Chief John Grote. All calls for Miami Township Fire-Rescue go through Xenia 911, even if they are called into the YSPD non-emergency number. In that case, the local dispatcher will call it in to the 911 system.

Most calls for the YSPD are called in through the non-emergency number and are handled directly by the local dispatchers. Only about five calls for police assistance per week come in through 911, he said. The Xenia 911 dispatcher will then radio the YSPD dispatcher, adding an extra step to the process.

Part-time dispatcher Randall Newsome works the 7 a.m.–3 p.m. shift on Saturdays and Sundays, the only shift with just one police officer on duty. On all other shifts there are two. According to Newsome, it is especially important to have a dispatcher on duty during that time to help out when a prisoner is brought in, both for the officer’s and the prisoner’s safety. It is the dispatcher’s responsibility, if a prisoner resists arrest while in the building, to call for help and provide additional security.

Newsome, who is a retired teacher and Mills Lawn School principal, has been a part-time dispatcher for 10 years. He worked as a dispatcher in the early ’60s, and worked for seven years as a part-time police officer in the village, while he was a teacher. Like the other dispatchers who were interviewed, he is a long-time resident of the village and knows most of the people who call in on the non-emergency number.

Newsome wrote the Yellow Springs Police Dispatchers Operating Manual, which reads, “Dispatchers shall constantly be mindful that their position is primarily one of developing and maintaining positive relationships with the community and promoting the concept of teamwork for the benefit of all. The face-to-face contact with citizens who come to the dispatch window facilitates and enhances positive public relations.”

Also written into the manual is a long list of what Newsome calls “amenities.” They include such items as making the citizens feel more comfortable in contacting the police; contacting citizens when their missing animals are found; responding to citizens’ questions about utility outages; providing information for out-of-town visitors; and serving as a sounding board for citizens to help defuse situations. Villagers who have been taking these services for granted will most likely not realize the impact of the loss of these amenities until they are gone, he said.

Often when there is an emergency, people will simply come down to the Bryan Center, he said. One time as he was going off his shift a man came in to report that his wife was having a heart attack in the parking lot. Along with all of the other dispatchers, Newsome has seen many serious injuries come through the back door to the Bryan Center from the skate park. Newsome worries about the day when someone with an emergency shows up at the back door to find the lights out and the door locked.

A cost-saving measure?
Chief Grote acknowledges that a county-wide central dispatch center, which he described as “Plan B,” is far from a reality. He reported at a May community meeting sponsored by the Yellow Springs Men’s Group, that it would be at least two years before such a system would be up and running. When interviewed recently, he said he had recently attended a meeting of police, fire, EMS, township trustees and village and city managers in Xenia and felt the plans for the project were beginning to unravel. The advanced technology proposed for such a system would benefit Yellow Springs because the village currently relies on antiquated equipment, he said, but a lot of jurisdictions with already technically advanced operations want more out of a central dispatch system than the current plan includes.

He came away from the meeting with a draft of the Emergency Management Department Central Dispatch Operations Fund Budget Analysis, which he said indicated that the Village would save only about $33,000 in the first year and, due to inflation, the system would get more expensive as time went on. According to Grote, that is not even one dispatcher’s salary, especially when you consider benefits and uniform allowances.

In a written summary of his June 5 presentation to the Village Council regarding potential cuts in service and the possible need for a levy to increase revenues, Village Manager Eric Swansen said that eliminating local dispatchers would save Yellow Springs approximately $90,000 per year.

“Plan C,” Grote said, would be to join Xenia Dispatch. He said that he has talked to Xenia Police Chief Randy Person and that, although he cannot disclose the figures, the savings to the Village would be substantial. The product, however, would be different from that proposed by Central Dispatch. When told of Lisa Crosswhite’s “flip of the switch” remark, he said that changing systems wouldn’t be that easy.

Of the changes in the way the department would operate if there were no local dispatchers, Grote said that the Law Enforcement Automated Data System (LEADS) computer would stay here, so officers could enter warrants for Mayor’s Court and would not have to go to Xenia to use LEADS.

Grote acknowledged that the local dispatchers have a lot of knowledge about the individuals who call in regularly and what their specific needs are. However, not every dispatcher has the same knowledge, he said. With the Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) system that would be used by a central dispatch system, the same information, as well as criminal history and satellite imagery of the locale, would theoretically be available to all dispatchers on screen as soon as a call came in, he said.

But CAD is dependent on reliable data entry from information received over a number of calls. He added that the Village would probably not be able to afford this kind of technology on its own. He is currently working on obtaining a grant to upgrade the department’s mobile radio system to be compatible with others throughout the state.

Not having another body in the building would have its consequences in the case of an arrest, because a prisoner could not be left alone in the building, he said. But with two-officer shifts and mutual aid agreements, he felt that there would be coverage in the Village whenever an officer needed to transport a prisoner to Xenia.

Grote had told the community meeting that, if local dispatching were eliminated, he hoped that the Yellow Springs dispatchers would be absorbed into a county-wide system.

“Everything is still on the table,” Grote said.