[Background Index] [Media Relations] [Home]
Wednesday, April 9, 1997
Background
National Public Safety Telecommunicators' Week
A panicked and hysterical citizen barely manages to dial 9-1-1 and blurts out sketchy bits of the details. An experienced dispatcher on the receiving end of the call fights back a natural adrenaline rush, remains calm and pieces together the parts of the crisis. The necessary public safety vehicles are quickly dispatched to the scene where another life-and-death situation is handled.
That evening and the next morning, news media splash pictures of law enforcement, fire and emergency medical teams across television screens and front pages while the dispatcher who made the right decisions at the right time quietly takes another call.
President Bill Clinton and the U.S. Congress have designated the second week in April as National Public Safety Telecommunicators' Week to honor and recognize those experienced professionals who sit quietly and calmly under subdued lighting and answer myriad citizen calls.
Citizens depend on Public Safety Telecommunicators -- dispatchers for the Caddo Parish Sheriff's Office and the Shreveport Fire and Police Departments -- inside the communications nerve center on Texas Avenue to draw out the necessary information, make the critical decisions and quickly dispatch the assistance and services that save lives and property.
Caddo Parish Public Safety Telecommunicators will be honored next week, along with more than a half million of their colleagues nationwide. The President and Congress are joined by local governmental bodies in proclaiming April 13-19 as National Public Safety Telecommunicators' Week.
To further recognize the dedicated efforts of these communications professionals, the Caddo Parish 9-1-1 board of directors will send three dispatchers -- one from each agency -- to the International Public Safety Communications Conference in Charlotte, N.C., in August for continuing education.
Inside the 9-1-1 Center, Telecommunicators will celebrate their week with a quick pizza party -- most likely enjoyed in front of a dispatch console. Then, between bites of pizza, one dispatcher will send fire crews to a burning house, another might calmly coach a child to breathe life-giving air into a stricken parent until paramedics arrive and yet another steers a patrol car along the quickest route to a crime victim. It really is all in a day's work.