National Telecommunicators Week

It’s #NationalPublicSafetyTelecommunicators Week — a chance to recognize the people behind the scenes who are genuinely the lifeline of public safety. The calm in the chaos. The ones who get us the help we need before we even ask for it.

Some of the best dispatchers I’ve ever known worked with a yellow legal pad and a pen. That’s it. No drop-downs. No scripts. Just a sharp mind, a calm voice, and a gut-level understanding of the job. They knew the beats, the streets, the frequent flyers, and most importantly, they knew us. They understood what we needed in the field because they’d been doing it long enough to anticipate the next move.

Today, many agencies have locked their dispatchers into computer systems that force them to ask a series of “required” questions before they can even dispatch a call. It is as if a crisis will wait until the boxes are all checked.
We’ve turned dispatching into data entry — at the expense of officer safety, efficiency, and common sense.

Instead of empowering people to think, we’ve programmed them to follow. We’ve built workflows that treat every caller the same and every incident like a transaction. In the process, we’ve removed the very thing that made dispatching effective: intuition.

In reality, many of today’s dispatchers don’t have the years of experience that gave the old-school voices that edge. They're learning in a system that doesn't encourage deep knowledge of the beats, the neighborhoods, or the officers on the street. That’s not their fault — it’s ours.

We’ve created a culture where checking the correct box matters more than asking the right question.

Let me be clear: I’m not anti-technology. I’m anti-stupidity. If the system helps, great. But when the system slows us down, makes us less safe, and strips dispatchers of their ability to use judgment, we need to fix the system, not the people.

It’s time we start trusting our dispatchers again. Not just to read a script but to think. To know their officers. To recognize when something sounds off. To bypass the prompts when a gut feeling says, “Get them moving now.”
So yes, let’s thank them this week. Let’s celebrate them. But let’s also do something more meaningful — give them their instincts back.

Behind every great officer is a dispatcher who got them there on time.