Again, there wasn't much happening this week. The training does mean that I am on phones all day, every day, but my primary focus is the probationary dispatcher in my charge, and not working the strangest most involved calls I can find.
None of the calls this week lasted very long so instead of the usual dialogue I include from the really good ones, what follows will be just the highlights of a trio of calls we got this week.
#1 Came in as a young woman reporting that she woke up after a "pretty big party" to find a man she barely knew in her room trying to undress her. She kicked him in the stomach and ran upstairs to the room of another male roommate who, after a couple hours was able to convince her to call the police.
Now this call, as far as I can tell turned out to be true. The problems I have with it are this: the caller is a young, single female who lives in a house that appears to be entirely populated by drunk, college age guys? Is that the safest, best room and board you could find?
The suspect stayed over, not frequently, but not too infrequently, and the caller knew both is first and last name, and his approximate age (down to a couple months)--which is great! I've taken enough calls from meth addicts shacking up with their dealers who can't give last names or approximate ages or even their current address. So this was starting out pretty good.
But, after further inquiry, the situation turned out to be this: the male half, who isn't really a friend of anyone who lives in the house at this point, sometimes stays over and spends the night just a few feet away from the basement bedroom of the caller-just out of ear shot of anyone she might want to call to for help, but only when everyone has had too much to drink isn't making good decisions.
For knowing his name and age, that was about all that could be found out about the guy. Apparently no one in the house really knew who he was or where he came from. It was just one of those houses where you could crash at the end of a good long drink and try to pick up an STD or two, or maybe a rape charge if you wanted.
#2 This is my pet peeve of 9-1-1 calls: the acrimonious divorced couple who call the police (generally refusing to leave their name at first) trying to report drug use, neglect, or other types of child abuse in the ex's home. In all honesty, these are the calls where I'm most likely to get testy with the callers and let them get under my skin. My favorite was one where the mother was trying to report the father--after a couple minutes of listening to her raving, I felt she needed to be reminded that it is very rare that a court would award full custody to the father instead of the mother and that spoke a great deal to me about her life style...and he hadn't even called me.
In the end, she had no specifics to report. All she could say was that the father occasionally drinks in his own home-admitted he doesn't drive when he drinks-and that there's never been any signs of abuse from the children. All legal activities--and none approaching whatever she must have been into for a judge to say that the father got full custody and any visitation rights for the mother was at the father's discretion.
#3 I had a call yesterday about a solicitor that started off like this, word for word: "Um, yeah. I just had a young hispanic gentleman at my door trying to sell something and well it just seemed like kind of a weird hour for them to be out."
I was trying to set an example for my trainee so I fought back the urge to ask if "Them" was referring to hispanics in general or just to those who sell magazine subscriptions. Racists...can't live with 'em, can't shoot 'em.
It was 6:30pm! Yeah, it's getting dark by then here in CO, but if I were selling something door to door and wanted to catch people coming home from work, it's when I'd be out, dark or not.
The caller was from one of the more affluent neighborhoods in town, and the people up there do make calls like this. Not all the time, but frequently enough that we've noted it. If it's a suspicious person call coming from that neighborhood, he's probably going to be described as black or hispanic--in the same way that just about every stray dog nowadays is either a "pitt bull" or "has some pitt in him."
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