Workers at Ottawa police call centre face challenges

by Tom McMillan

The call came in early one fall morning.

A trucker had lost his balance and fallen headfirst from his eighteen-wheeler. He awoke dazed and bleeding but managed to crawl into the cab, where he dialed 911 on his cellphone. Joanne Lowry received his call.

"He said, 'I don't know where I am, I can't really see. There's blood all over my face,'" recounts Lowry, who was then a dispatcher at the Ottawa Police Communications Centre.

She recalls this incident with a small smile. The story is from the early 90's, but the message is current: working in the Communications Centre is a difficult job. It is also a rewarding one.

"It's a work that can't really be compared with too many others," she says. "I love the idea that you don't know what's coming in next."

The Communications Centre processes all calls to the Ottawa police, including 911. The centre evaluates incoming calls for priority and validity, dispatches officers and liaises between patrol officers and communications. In emergencies, the centre also directs ambulances, tow-trucks and other necessary services to the scene.

"Everything comes through here," Lowry says proudly, as she brushes her short black hair from her unlined face. "We're number one."

Lowry is now 43 and a communication supervisor at the centre. Lowry says computers were a new thing when she started in 1980. Now she oversees and manages a staff that can barely function without them. She also assists on difficult calls and requests special units to the scene, such as the police tactical unit.

Lowry says her job is one of constant variety. Working at the centre, she says, "you don't know what's going to happen next." There may be a bank robbery one moment and cows blocking a road the next, she says with a laugh.

According to Lowry, rewarding experiences happen daily at the centre. It is an amazing feeling, she says, "to talk someone through a robbery." A person calls in mad panic, she says, and dispatchers must procure information, organize an appropriate response, and take steps to maximize the caller's safety, all while offering constant reassurance.

Lowry says she didn't know what to do when the truck driver called the centre. So she told him to honk his horn in series of threes, trusting her "gut feeling." Lowry hoped the rhythm might sound like an SOS and the task would keep him focused and awake. As he honked, she talked. She tried desperately, Lowry recalls, to keep him conscious.

Lowry admits that at times she simply "doesn't like the job very much." Operators feel a human connection with every caller, she says, and the constant negativity can wear on dispatchers.

"Fifty hours a week, all you hear are bad things," says Lowry. "People only call the police when something bad's happened."

She says every dispatcher struggles with maintaining a distance from the caller. Talking someone through a robbery or a suicide can be "heartbreaking," Lowry says, especially when it ends badly. Listening to a person's tears as they recount stolen memories or to depressed callers contemplate suicide is extremely difficult, she says. For her, calls involving children and the elderly are the hardest. Elderly victims are tragic, she says, "because they are the wisest people that walk this earth."

According to Lowry, the centre's unspoken fear is incidents involving family. This is especially true for her. A crucial aspect of being supervisor is speaking to the coroner at the crime scene. Her greatest fear, she says, is that "it will be one of my people's families." Or, even worse, "that it's one of mine."

Police officers say the centre's work is appreciated. Const. David Fong describes the centre as a "lifeline." Through it, he says, officers stay in contact with each other, protect their safety and receive help when needed. Wong actually worked in the centre during Ottawa's 2003 blackout. Experiencing that chaos "makes you appreciate what they do," he says.

Lowry talked with the injured truck driver for more than 45 minutes. Finally, the call came in. A farmer had heard a horn honking in strange patterns of three and gone to investigate. When he found the trucker, the farmer quickly ran home and called police with the truck's location.

The horn, she recalls with a happy smile, was her suggestion.