Bipartisan Bill Seeks to Reclassify 911 Operators

WASHINGTON — Its sponsors call it a small change from a congressional perspective, but one that would be incredibly meaningful to the 911 operators that millions of Americans rely on in an emergency each year.

On Wednesday, Reps. Norma Torres, D-Calif., herself a former 911 operator, and Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., reintroduced the Supporting Accurate Views of Emergency Service Act, otherwise known as the 911 SAVES Act, which would direct the federal government to reclassify emergency dispatchers in the Standard Occupational Classification System.

The system is a statistical standard used by federal agencies to classify workers into occupational categories. These categories are often used to set salary scales, establish training regimes and opportunities, and provide workers with paths to advancement.

Currently, 911 dispatchers — often the first point of contact when someone is in a life-threatening situation — are classified as “administrative/clerical” workers by the federal government.

Torres, Fitzpatrick and members of the National Emergency Number Association, a group that promotes the constant improvement of the national 911 emergency system, want 911 dispatchers and call-takers to be reclassified as being in a “protective service occupation.”

“All we’re asking is that the federal government do the right thing by dispatchers,” Torres said.

“I mean, these are the people who coordinate the emergency response, who keep victims and family members on the phone when they can to ensure that they remain safe, and to make sure police and other emergency responders understand the situation when they arrive on the scene,” she said.

“Shouldn’t we acknowledge all of that?” she asked.

For Torres, the quest is personal. In fact, she said Wednesday, if it wasn’t for a searing experience she had as a young dispatch trainee, she probably wouldn’t be in Congress today.

“It was a busy summer night, and I was on the graveyard shift,” she said. “I wasn’t supposed to be taking calls, but that night in Los Angeles, I was the only person in the office who spoke Spanish.”

Torres said the call that changed her life was unintelligible at first.

“My initial thought was that it was a typical domestic violence call,” she said. “All I could hear at the time were sounds, like a series of thumps,” she said. “Then there were a series of horrific screams and the sounds of five shots.”

With that, Torres heard more screams, and someone else picking up the phone.

“I asked if anybody had been injured. The panicked voice at the other end of the line said ‘yes,'” and then she was disconnected.

Officers were on the scene in a matter of seconds, but it was far too late to save the little girl who’d been shot five times at point blank range with a 9 mm pistol.

Later, at about 3 a.m. that morning, detectives asked Torres to go to the Hollywood police station. Once again as she was the only dispatcher on duty who spoke Spanish, a duty she didn’t expect fell to her: they asked her to transcribe the tape of the call.

“I sat in the interview room, listening to that tape over and over. And I realized that what I’d heard as muffled sounds or thumps, were actually a series of words: ‘Uncle please don’t kill me. It’s not my fault.’”

Torres, who described herself up to that point as having the life of a soccer mom with three kids, testified at the trial of the child’s killer and found herself standing at the gravesite as the girl was buried.

“I realized then that a big part of the stress dispatchers deal with is not having any closure in these situations,” she said. “You can end up really, really, really stressed and personalizing these types of calls.”

“In my case,” Torres said, “I channeled what I was feeling into being a voice for the voiceless victims. I taught myself to lobby on behalf of them, and I began working with my union to lobby the Los Angeles City Council for more funding and training and recruitment dollars.

“Later, after I got elected to the California State Assembly, I introduced a measure to ensure that 911 dispatchers would be prioritized in our funding, and today is about reclassifying 911 dispatchers because their jobs matter to the victims who are calling 911 every single day for help.

“It’s a common sense bill. It won’t cost the taxpayers anything. And it’s just good governance,” she said.

Fitzpatrick described 911 dispatchers and call-takers as “a critical piece” of the first responder community, placing them shoulder to shoulder with the police, firefighters and medics they direct to the scene of an emergency.

“Like the other members of the first responder community, being a dispatcher requires you to have a unique set of skills,” he said. 

“These include negotiation skills, medical skills, an ability to stay calm and to transmit that calm to others, and you’ve got to be able to multitask and be able to dispatch the right people to the right places for a whole host of different situations. So God bless Norma for trying to rectify this classification situation,” he said.

Jeff Cohen, chief counsel for the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials, said changing the classification of 911 dispatchers would go a long way toward recognizing the efforts of professionals “whose work is nothing is nothing short of extraordinary.”

“A well-trained public safety telecommunicator takes actions that can make the difference between life and death,” Cohen said. “This isn’t about comparing one job to another. But if the people working in casinos, watching for cheaters, are classified as being in the protective service, and people giving out parking tickets at expired meters are a protective service, surely the public safety professional who answers 911 calls and coaches the caller in CPR or gathers critical details during an active shooter event should be recognized for serving in a protective service occupation. Appropriately classifying public safety telecommunicators is the right thing to do, and it’s just common sense.”

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