Almost every police dispatcher has a nightmare call that sticks with them.
For Nikki Nelson, Victoria police’s acting communications centre supervisor, it was a call one Saturday night three years ago that stood out from the reports of bar brawls and domestic violence.
It was a little boy on the line, whispering: “Help me.”
Nelson replied: “Hello, can you hear me?”
And the child responded: “I’m going to kill you.”
Nelson, who spoke to the media Friday as part of National Public Safety Telecommunications Week, could hear noise in the background of the home, but couldn’t tell if it was a fight, a party or a loud television.
Nelson could get the cellphone co-ordinates from the nearest cell tower, but that didn’t give her an exact address.
Her partner checked the system to see if anyone from that phone number had called in the past and an address came up. Police went to that address, where the homeowners said the people who might own the phone had moved to an address a few blocks away.
Meanwhile, Nelson was still trying to communicate with the child to find out if he was in danger.
When the line went dead, Nelson was paralyzed with worry.
Then, another 911 call came in. The officers were at the home of the child, who had sneaked out of bed to play a video game with his parents’ old cellphone as they entertained guests downstairs. Relief washed over Nelson as she realized it was a false alarm.
“In that span of time, I was sick — you’re holding your breath the whole time,” said Nelson, a married grandmother who has been working with Victoria police since 2009.
Dale Sylvestre had the opposite type of call: one that sounds like a false alarm but is all too real and horrific.
Sylvestre, who manages the call centre at West Shore RCMP, was working for the RCMP in northern Manitoba several years ago when he got a call from an elderly woman.
He at first thought she might be having mental-health problems, because she was talking about men surrounding her house and coming to hurt her.
Sylvestre stayed on the phone with the woman as he dispatched police to the remote rural property, about 45 minutes away from the station.
Suddenly, he could hear windows smashing and the sound of the men who had broken in.
“I could hear her screaming in terror,” Sylvestre recalled.
“I ended up staying on the phone with dead air probably for 40 minutes after the assault was over, and finally the RCMP member did get there and discovered she had been badly beaten.”
Call-takers and dispatchers have critical-incident debriefing services and access to psychological support, Sylvestre said, to ensure the stress of the job doesn’t become too much.
Communications centre staff take suicide-intervention courses and often act as first-line crisis negotiators for those experiencing a mental-health crisis. Nelson said she speaks to someone who is suicidal on nearly every shift.
Establishing a rapport with someone over the phone is critical, Sylvestre said. “You’ve got to convey to them that you are interested and you want to help them.”
One of the call-takers’ most important jobs is determining whether the person on the other line has any weapons that could be a threat to themselves or the officers responding to the call, Nelson said.
“I’ll say, ‘My officers are coming to your door. I need you to make sure you don’t have anything in your hands,’ ” she said. “The end result of a perfect call is everyone goes home at the end of the day and people get the help that they need.”
