did not start my career in 911. There was no 911 yet. I started by answering emergency calls at a time when doing so was considered useful not only because someone needed to respond to emergencies, but because it gave police agencies something else they badly needed: warm bodies available around the clock to handle clerical work. Warrants needed to be entered into the computer. Stolen articles needed to be logged. Validations needed to be run. And if the person doing all of that also happened to answer emergency calls and dispatch officers, well, that was convenient too. My supervisor used to say, “I don’t care who works, I just need a warm body in the chair.”
I spent 38 years watching that Origin story follow the profession like a shadow. Even as dispatch evolved into something far more complex, far more skilled, and far more consequential than its clerical roots, the perception lagged. And in many places, it still does. Let me provide you with some examples. First, you should know that I worked my way up in the dispatch center, from call taker, through all the positions, to Director. As an executive director, I have sat in rooms where agency leaders described my dispatchers as people who “just answer the phone.” (and I bristled!) I have been told, directly, to “just get over myself” when I advocated for the professionals in my centers. I have watched a dispatcher be forgotten, literally left off the invitation list, for a critical incident debriefing after one of the most traumatic calls of his career. I have spent nearly four decades fighting myths that have real consequences for real people.
This article is my attempt to dismantle the most damaging of those myths — not with detachment, but with the weight of experience behind every word. Because these are not abstract arguments. I lived them. My dispatchers lived them. Many of you are still living them. And the profession deserves to have them named, challenged, and put to rest.
MYTH 1: “It’s Not Stressful Because You Don’t Have to SEE the Scene.”
THE REALITY: Video911 technology aside, because that discussion (a whole new realm) does not relate to this myth of SEEING the scene. I want to tell you about a dispatcher I supervised. He was experienced, dedicated, and exactly the kind of person you want on the other end of a 911 call. One night, a fire broke out in a residential structure. A woman was trapped. She called 911, and he answered. He did everything he could to make her safe, but she was beyond listening. She was in very real terms, hysterical and unable to respond to his directions. The fire department was on the way. There was nothing more to be done operationally. But the woman on the line was being overcome by smoke and she was dying, and she was terrified, and she was alone, and this dispatcher made a choice that I believe defines the character of this profession. He stayed on the line with her. He kept talking to her, even when he heard her collapse and she stopped responding. He made sure that she did not die alone. He stayed with her until he heard her last breath. The fire that night was devastating enough that the fire department held a formal critical incident stress debriefing. They gathered their people. They processed the trauma together. They did what agencies are supposed to do after something like that.
Except that, they forgot to invite the dispatcher.
“He heard her last breath. Then he took the next call.”
He was forever changed by that night, and he processed it, largely, alone. He hadn’t seen the fire. He hadn’t carried anyone out. He had just been on the phone. Please don’t misunderstand, his peers were there, they checked on him, his supervisor team was there, they checked on him. But there were assumptions made, the assumption of forgetting to invite him to the stress debrief prevailed by the responders, because they assumed that he hadn’t really been there.
That assumption is wrong, and it is dangerous, and it has caused immeasurable harm to the men and women in this profession. What a dispatcher experiences is something researchers have come to call vicarious trauma or secondary traumatic stress, and in the dispatch environment, it is anything but secondary. A dispatcher does not see the scene. She hears it. He hears it. They hear the fear, the pain, the silence that comes when someone stops responding. And unlike a field responder who eventually leaves a scene, a dispatcher hangs up and immediately answers the next call. There is no drive back to the station. There is no moment to breathe. There is the next ring.
Research has documented what dispatchers have known for years: rates of PTSD, burnout, anxiety, and depression in telecommunicators are alarmingly high, comparable in many cases to those seen in field responders. Yet dispatchers remain among the least likely to be formally recognized for that risk, and among the least likely to have access to mental health resources designed specifically for what they experience.
The dispatcher who stayed on the line with that woman was not “just on the phone.” He was present for her death in every way that matters. The absence of physical danger does not mean the absence of trauma. It means the trauma lives somewhere else — somewhere that, for too long, no one thought to look.
MYTH 2 : “Dispatchers Are Just Glorified Secretaries.”
THE REALITY: If you want to understand where this myth comes from, look at how dispatch centers were born. When I started in this field, the work was genuinely mixed. We answered emergency calls and dispatched responders — but we also entered warrants, logged stolen property, ran validations, and handled a steady stream of administrative tasks that kept police agencies running through the night. We were, in practice, being asked to do two jobs: one that required professional emergency communications skills, and one that was clerical support. The problem was not that we did both. The problem was that the clerical work became the lens through which the entire role was understood — and that perception solidified into policy, into classification, into the assumption that dispatch was fundamentally an administrative function with some phone answering mixed in.
I fought hard to change that. Specifically, as a director, I fought to move the warrant entry process out of dispatch centers and into courts and records sections, where that work more appropriately belonged. My goal was simple: free my dispatchers to do the work they were actually trained and needed to do, without the cognitive burden of managing court documents in the middle of an active dispatch environment. To me, this was a no-brainer; they should be focused on the safety and welfare of the responders and the citizens we served first and foremost. Period.
A county judge where I worked disagreed strongly. When a warrant that had passed through our dispatch center was mishandled, he called me in. He was furious. He told me that if another warrant was ever lost, he would have me arrested (to this day, I couldn’t tell you what he planned to charge me with); his threat had nothing to do with the lost warrant itself. He was getting even because I dared to suggest that warrant management should not be a dispatcher’s responsibility in the first place. In his view, the system worked — dispatchers handled the warrants, dispatchers were accountable for the warrants — and my effort to professionalize dispatch by removing clerical functions from it was a threat to an arrangement that served everyone – everyone but the dispatchers.
“I wasn’t trying to shirk responsibility. I was trying to give dispatchers back their focus — because focus saves lives.”
That story captures something important: the clerical classification of dispatchers was not just a perception problem. It was baked into institutional arrangements that powerful people had built their processes around. Changing it meant disrupting systems that worked for everyone except the professionals trapped inside them. And here is the truth about what today’s dispatcher actually does, once you strip away the clerical mythology. They determine, from a fragmented and terrified 60-second phone call, whether what they are hearing is a medical emergency, a crime in progress, or a mental health crisis — and they make that determination in real time, under pressure, with lives depending on their accuracy. They coordinate multiple units across multiple simultaneous incidents. They talk bystanders through CPR. They recognize when a caller cannot speak freely and adapt their questioning accordingly. They manage radio traffic, computer-aided dispatch systems, multi-agency coordination, and jurisdictional protocol — all at once, for hours at a stretch.
That is not clerical work. That is professional emergency management. And classifying it as anything less does not just insult the people doing it — it shapes the budgets, the training dollars, the mental health resources, and the retirement benefits that determine whether this profession can attract and retain the caliber of professionals the public deserves.
One chief, during my tenure as the executive director of the PSAP overseeing his agency for dispatch services, told me plainly: ” My dispatch center existed for the sole purpose of doing what he wanted. He was wrong. And the dispatchers who worked under that attitude, who showed up every day and performed with professionalism despite it, deserved better than what that worldview offered them. They deserved to have someone fight for them behind the scenes, someone who could ultimately make it better for them, someone who understood that the dispatch center existed for so much more than doing what one chief wanted.
MYTH 3: “Training Dispatchers Is a Waste of Money.”
THE REALITY: I spent years working on committees to get national telecommunicator training standards adopted as mandatory requirements. It was painstaking work — building consensus, navigating politics, making the case over and over again to people who needed convincing that the people answering emergency calls in their jurisdictions deserved a professional standard of training. When it passed, I considered it one of the most meaningful accomplishments of my career. Then, a chief — the same one who had told me my dispatch center existed only to serve his agency’s wishes- stood up in a public meeting and said that I was an embarrassment to public safety for having pushed a standard that would force agencies to spend money training dispatch personnel. Because, in his view, they did nothing more than answer the phone and talk on the radio.
I have thought about that moment many times over the years. Not because it stung — though it did — but because it so perfectly illustrated the cost of this myth. Here was a leader in public safety, publicly arguing against professional training for the people responsible for sending help when citizens called for it. And he believed he was being fiscally responsible.
“Undertrained dispatchers aren’t a budget savings. They are a liability — to the public, to the agency, and to themselves.”
Let me be specific about what dispatcher training actually produces, because this argument deserves a direct answer. A trained emergency medical dispatcher follows structured, protocol-driven call processing that has been proven to improve patient outcomes before any ambulance arrives. When a dispatcher correctly identifies a cardiac arrest, stays on the line, and guides a caller through hands-only CPR, that intervention saves lives. The protocols that make it possible are not instinctive. They are learned, tested, and maintained through ongoing professional development. They are certification-based because this is a certified profession, or it should be everywhere.
Proper radio communication protocols ensure that officers receive accurate, timely information in the field — and that errors in communication do not cost officers or civilians their lives. Trained crisis call-handling techniques equip dispatchers to recognize and respond appropriately to callers contemplating suicide, callers experiencing psychiatric emergencies, and callers in domestic violence situations who cannot speak freely. These are not soft skills. They are life-safety competencies that require training to develop and practice to maintain.
The agencies that have invested in professional dispatcher training consistently see the returns: faster and more accurate call processing, improved officer safety, reduced liability exposure, better caller outcomes, and lower dispatcher turnover. These are not abstractions. They are the measurable results of treating dispatch as the professional function it is. The argument against training always comes down to cost. But the cost of an undertrained dispatcher who misidentifies a cardiac arrest, misroutes a unit, or fails to recognize a caller in crisis is not a line item in a training budget. It is a lawsuit. It is a tragedy. It is a community that has lost faith in its emergency system. And it is a dispatch team that was set up to fail by a system that decided they weren’t worth investing in.
Mandatory training standards are not a burden on public safety. They are the definition of it.
The Cost of Getting This Wrong: There is a thread connecting all three of these myths: they minimize. They minimize the cognitive demand, the psychological cost, and the professional skill required to do this work well. And that minimization, sustained over decades, has produced consequences that go far beyond hurt feelings in dispatch centers. Dispatcher turnover is a crisis in this profession. Centers across the country operate chronically understaffed, with experienced telecommunicators burning out and leaving faster than new ones can be trained and retained. I have watched it happen. I have lost good people to it. The reasons are not complicated: professionals who are not recognized, not supported, not adequately compensated, and not treated with the respect their work demands do not stay. They absorb years of accumulated trauma without adequate support structures, and they leave — if they are fortunate enough to recognize what is happening before it causes lasting damage.
Every departure takes institutional knowledge with it. Every understaffed center increases the pressure on the people who remain. Every dispatcher who develops PTSD in a workplace that doesn’t recognize dispatcher PTSD as a legitimate occupational injury is a person who served the public faithfully and was failed in return. These are the downstream costs of misclassification. Of undertrained centers. Of leadership that believes dispatchers just answer the phone.
What Real Recognition Looks Like: Recognizing dispatch as a true public safety profession is not a symbolic gesture. It has a practical checklist — one that I have spent the better part of four decades pushing toward:
- 725, at this writing, is awaiting final consideration in the House. S.725 is known as the Enhancing First Response Act and aims to improve the reporting system for network outages and categorize public safety telecommunicators as protective service occupations. Legislative reclassification of dispatchers as first responders at the state and federal levels will open up access to the protections, benefits, and mental health resources that classification carries.
- Mandatory, funded training standards that reflect the professional nature of the work — initial certification, continuing education, protocol compliance, and quality assurance.
- Formal peer support and mental health programs designed specifically for the telecommunicator experience — not borrowed from field responder models, but built for what dispatchers actually go through.
- Compensation structures that reflect the complexity, responsibility, and psychological demands of the role, not clerical pay scales inherited from a history that no longer describes the job.
- Agency leadership that speaks publicly and consistently about the value of their dispatch professionals — not just in Dispatcher Appreciation Week proclamations, but in budget meetings, in policy decisions, and in the culture they set every day.
None of this is radical. It is what has already been achieved in the agencies and states that have led on this issue. It is what the national standards movement has been working toward. It is what this profession has always deserved and what the public — who dials 911 in their worst moments — has always needed.
A Final Word — To Dispatchers, and To the Leaders Who Oversee Them
To the dispatchers reading this: I want you to hear something clearly. The myths we have been dismantling in this article are not a reflection of your worth. They are a reflection of a system that has been painfully slow to catch up to the reality of what you do every single day. You are not just a dispatcher. You are the first voice in someone’s worst moment. You are the one who sends help, who makes the call under pressure, who stays on the line when staying on the line is all you can do. You carry things with you that most people will never understand — calls that don’t leave you when your shift ends, voices you can’t forget, moments that have changed you in ways you may not have been given the space to process. You have earned, in the fullest sense of the word, the title of public safety professional. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. I spent most of my career saying so, and I will continue. You are not just a dispatcher, you ARE a dispatcher!
“You are not support staff. You are not a glorified secretary. You are the first responder before the first responders arrive. You are the difference.”
To the chiefs, sheriffs, administrators, and elected officials who oversee dispatch centers: So many of you out there are doing an amazing job recognizing the job of your 911 personnel. Thank you. To all of you – I am asking you to do something that costs nothing but attention. Look at what is actually happening in that room. Watch a dispatcher manage three simultaneous incidents on a Friday night. Sit with the reality that the person you just passed in the hallway may have heard someone die this week and is showing up anyway, professionally and without complaint, because that is the standard they hold themselves to. Then ask yourself whether your classification of them, your training budget for them, your mental health resources for them, and the way you speak about them in public meetings — reflect that reality.
The dispatcher who sat with a dying woman so she would not die alone deserved a seat at that debriefing table. He deserved to be seen. They all do.
It is not too late to start seeing them.
Now going into her fifth year with Equature, Cherie Bartram, ENP, brings 38 years of 911 emergency communications and a lifelong passion for the training and recognition of the individuals who dedicate their lives to the profession. She is proud to have worked alongside far more public safety officials who championed the 911 profession than those who did not. This article is written in recognition of every telecommunicator who has ever been told they “Just answer the phone.”