The 911 call came just as Friday night turned to Saturday morning: “There’s a kid with a gun.”
Or maybe it was a knife. There was a big fight, anyway, at an out-of-control house party near Ross Bay Cemetery. Shrieks and shouts drowned out the breathless caller, who kept breaking away from the Victoria police operator to rejoin World War III. F-bombs fell like rain.
At the VicPD communications centre, call-taker Jodi McLaren typed furiously while trying to separate fact from fiction: Have you actually seen a gun, what was the suspect wearing, where is he now.
When the cavalry rode in, nine cops on scene within four minutes of the alert going out, McLaren had armed them with a pretty good picture of what to find.
Welcome to 911 Week, when we pause to consider the people who answer our frantic pleas for police, paramedics or firefighters.
In Greater Victoria, 911 staff can be found at Saanich police, the West Shore RCMP and upstairs at Victoria’s Caledonia Street cop shop, where half a dozen call-takers and dispatchers were on duty Friday night.
It can be a stressful job, particularly when there are more crises than cops and the calls stack up like cordwood. Fire and ambulance calls are forwarded to those services, but police are dispatched in-house.
There are good nights, like the time McLaren was able to guide a little girl who had become lost while going to meet her father. “She was terrified. It was dark and raining. I stayed on the phone and talked her to where her dad was waiting.”
There are gut-wrenching nights, like the one in February when the police charged into a Johnson Street house fire that killed three young people. “You could hear in [the officers’] voices that it was bad, it was really bad.” McLaren thinks of the cops on her watch as family.
Then there are those times when the 911 staff themselves hold life in the balance.
In March 2012, Pet Francis got a call from a delusional man who said “little people” were invading his Gorge Road home, trying to kill him. “But it’s OK,” he said. “I have guns.” Four guns, in fact, which he fired through the wall 13 times.
Francis kept the man on the line for half an hour, kept him calm until the Emergency Response Team could move in and a negotiator could take over. What could easily have been a tragedy ended peacefully.
Nothing that dramatic in the wee hours Saturday, though by 1 a.m. it was getting interesting. The fashion police are dispatched to deal with an extremely intoxicated man staggering down the 1900 block of Douglas Street in red Ghostbusters pyjama bottoms. A woman says she has been assaulted by a Gorge Road bouncer. Another woman is making a scene in a fast-food restaurant. A tenant is threatening staff at a social-housing building. Someone is dealing drugs in — gasp! — Centennial Square. Someone else is playing guitar and singing at the top of his lungs near Stadacona Park.
A guy who had been “pre-drinking” before hitting the clubs is alternating between barfing and slipping into unconsciousness outside a Fern Street apartment building. A mother, holding it together because she has to, reports that her daughter has OD’d. Elsewhere, worried neighbours hear a woman screaming at a home with a history of domestic assaults.
Surrounded by Star Trek arrays of computer screens, tracking GPS-equipped police cars on electronic maps, communications staff juggle it all, allocating resources. “You can equate it to a live pinball game,” McLaren says, “except you want to do it right, or someone could die.”
Meanwhile, the Douglas Street drunk has decided to peel off his red Ghostbusters pyjama bottoms.
Fashion faux pas aside, the job is stressful, which is why staff enjoy the calming company of C.C., a grey cat who has lived in the communications centre ever since she leapt into a cop car one night. That was 14 years ago. C.C. rules the place.
It doesn’t help when 911 is tied up with nonsense calls, which happens regularly. On New Year’s, drunks phoned VicPD to complain they couldn’t get a cab. On Boxing Day, Burnaby RCMP were swamped by drivers moaning about being stuck in shopping mall parking lots. When working in Creston, Victoria dispatcher Colleen Bulmer once fielded a call from someone complaining of pigs wading in wet cement. “People used to call 911 to get their chainsaw fixed.”
This week, Alberta introduced legislation that would allow fines to be levied against those who call 911 without a real emergency.
Also this past week, Prince Edward Island introduced a law to combat an even bigger problem: butt dialling. Promising fines of up to $500 for those who accidentally call 911, the new law would make it illegal to program the emergency number into cellphones.
Sounds draconian, but abandoned 911 calls, almost all from accidentally triggered mobile devices, have become a huge issue. Communication centre supervisor Theresa Lundy says that of the more than 83,000 calls to VicPD’s 911 lines last year, 9,400 were abandoned. There were 25 on Friday alone.
Sometimes the pocket-dialled calls provide unintended drama; communications staff occasionally hear butt-callers singing, going to the bathroom, having sex. (And let’s not forgot the Victoria mom who called 911 after hearing blood-curdling screams from her daughter’s phone — turns out Junior had pocket-dialled her from a horror movie.)
All disconnected calls have to be checked out, though, just in case there is a real emergency. In fact, Friday’s kid-with-a-gun report began with McLaren returning an abandoned call. When such calls come from a land line, police will actually visit the home to make sure all is OK.
Here’s a 911 tip: If you call from a land line, your address automatically pops up on the communication-centre screen, but mobile calls only show the closest cellphone tower.
McLaren was once able to send police to the home of a woman who, gripping her phone under the covers, pretended to sleep as a burglar crept past.
Ponder that image, and be glad there’s someone on the other end of the phone.
