Asklemmy

I really like "wait" being part of that. A whole lot of callers will just go on forever if you let them, they talk in circles, try to tell you their entire life story, repeat themselves, and ramble on about a bunch of irrelevant stuff that I'm not going to do anything with and isn't going into my notes. There's exceptions of course, but very often I'm boiling everything down to about 5 or less short bullet-point-like notes, not even full sentences. We're not taking a report, that's the cops' job, we're just telling them where to go, a brief description of what's going on, and any important hazards or strange situations that are going on they need to be on the lookout for.

I don't really have any interest in doing an AMA to be honest.

A lot of the questions would probably end up being variations of "what's the craziest/funniest/saddest/etc call you've taken?" Which I don't want to get into too much, it's a bit of a pain in the ass going over my stories to make sure I'm not giving away any identifiable info about the people involved, and some of the bigger calls I've had have made the news so I could end up partially doxxing myself. On top of that, a lot of my stories don't have much of an ending. Once the call is over that's usually it for me, I don't really get any follow-up most of the time.

Then there's the "should I call 911 if..." questions. Every agency handles things differently, but overall a lot of places are kind of moving towards handling everything through the same dispatch center, emergency or non-emergency alike, so one way or another it's probably going to come through us, so just call 911 and cut out the middle man. If you need a cop to do something, even if it's call you on the phone, call 911. Worst case scenario we'll tell you to call the station directly, and maybe even give you the phone number, you really need to be a major nuisance before anyone even dreams of getting you in trouble for misusing 911. If you have an administrative question like "is my copy of the report ready to be picked up?" "I need to make an appointment to get fingerprinted for my job" "I want to drop off a bunch of cookies for the cops" then yeah, call the station's non emergency number.

"What if I butt-dial 911" just stay on the line, say "sorry, I accidentally dialed you, there's no emergency."

"How do you deal with burn-out?" I just kind of do. There's a lot of different philosophies on this, but personally I think if you have to spend time actually thinking about how to deal with it, you're already on the losing side of the battle. I have family, friends, etc. who I can talk to, hobbies, a life outside of work, etc. It's not something I really worry about, my brain is pretty well wired to deal with the stress without having to really think about how I'm doing it.

"ACAB," yes. If I could do the same job for just fire/EMS, and/or replace most of my police calls with therapists, counselors, crisis intervention specialists, etc. I would absolutely do it in a heartbeat, but I gotta work with the tools I got.

"I called 911 once, and they ..." I really can't speak for your local dispatch center, certainly not your local police, etc. I can tell you how I would have handled a situation and how things probably would have played out here, but that may not mean shit for your situation. Some dispatch centers are trash, if you're living in an area that's covered by one I'm sorry. We're also stuck with a lot of rules and regulations, bureaucracy, etc. so how/why we do some things may not make total sense to people on the outside but by and large there's a reason for most of it, you gotta try to work with the system, fighting it isn't going to get you anywhere.

"I just want to say thank you for doing what you do" I appreciate it, but not really a question

I happy to answer other questions as they come up, but an AMA would probably end up just mostly rehashing those same things in different forms.