“And remember, this is your brain on drugs.”
I clicked off line one, then contacted one of my officers to do the deed. All calls to nine-one-one required an officer response. Hence that whole felony offense thing. In approximately three to five minutes, Mr. I Got a Big Butt wasn’t gonna be feeling so grand about life.
One twenty A.M. My twin monitors remained blank, the phone lines quiet. Not too bad a night, but then it was only Wednesday. Call patterns had a tendency to pick up as the week went on. Friday and Saturday were madness, a deluge of domestic assaults, drunken disorderlies, and OUIs. Sunday around five was the second busiest time. The witching hour, we called it: five o’clock being the hour when most noncustodial parents were required to return the 2.2 children to the custodial parent. Except judging purely by call volume, feuding parents enjoyed screwing with each other more than being responsible caretakers. By 5:01, we’d have the first call and the first officer involved in the weekly game of “No, ma’am, you may not shoot off his balls just because he’s two minutes late,” to be followed shortly by “Sir, a visitation agreement is a legal document; I suggest you read it.”
I tried to avoid Sundays. Domestic disputes made everyone cranky—the callers, my officers, me.
Overall, the city of Grovesnor, all twenty-five thousand people, was tame compared to my time in Arvada. There, I’d worked in a major call center, handling hundreds of calls an hour. These days, it was me, sitting alone in a darkened room with the dog that was not my dog. I generally received between ten and forty calls a shift. Ten on a night like tonight, forty on a weekend.
Number one call I handled every night—wrong number. Number two call—Mr. Big Butt, or Mr. Pepperoni Pizza to Go, or whatever latest thing a bunch of bored kids thought was funny. And yeah, I dispatched a uniformed officer to each and every address. Hey, I didn’t make the rules.
Only a third of the calls to 911 are for actual emergencies. More typically, I got reports of reckless driving, a dead or injured animal in the road, the occasional complaint against noisy neighbors. Information came in on my ANI ALI screen—ANI standing for Automatic Number Identification, ALI for Automatic Local Identification. Landlines were the easiest calls, with name, phone number, and address winking across my screen. Cell phone calls and Internet-based phone carriers (think Vonage) automatically went to the state police for them to sort out location, as such numbers weren’t linked to a physical address, making it difficult for me to dispatch an officer.
In addition to my ANI ALI monitor, I had a second system, the Dispatcher Event Mask. I entered all the information from the call into this system—details of an accident, description of an intruder, whatever. Then, I could shoot this information straight from my computer to an officer’s Mobile Data Computer in his police cruiser. Push of a button and ping, we were all on the same virtual page.
Assuming the system didn’t crash. Assuming I had the wherewithal to multitask between two monitors while simultaneously soothing a distressed caller, asking all pertinent questions, and typing in all relevant answers.
But other than that, easy breezy.
My ANI ALI monitor blazed to life. Name, phone number, street address appearing on the screen. I put on my headset and hit the button.
“Nine-one-one. Please state the nature of your emergency.”
“I…I don’t know.” Female voice this time. Quivering.
“Ma’am? Do you need assistance?”
“My husband is angry.”
“I see. Are you at home, ma’am?” I rattled off the street address from my screen; she confirmed. “And your name, ma’am?”
“Dawn.” She didn’t offer a last name. My screen listed the number as belonging to Vincent Heinen. For the time being, I didn’t press her.
“Dawn, nice to meet you. I’m Charlie. Is your husband at home?”