![]() Salaries range from about $40,000 to $64,000, plus benefits and a $1,500 signing bonus. In Pinellas, the job requires 20 weeks of paid training. ![]() “A lot of people don’t want to go into buildings for work anymore,” Heinze said. Some of Tampa Bay’s other large departments are experiencing glaring staffing shortages. According to April Heinze of the National Emergency Number Association, a pre-COVID-19 vacancy rate hovering below 20% has jumped to over 30%. It’s a modest gap, but since the pandemic, many 911 call centers have been reporting record retirements, mid-career quittings and openings they’re unable to fill. Where Swetson works, there are supposed to be 30 dispatchers, but the department is down three. “You’re not going to call the sheriff’s office because you’re having a good day,” Swetson says. You have to be able to juggle a half-dozen calls at a time, find out what suspect might have a gun and alert officers before someone gets hurt.Īnd you have to take people at their worst. To be a dispatcher, Swetson says, you have to be patient. She hears the starts of hundreds of stories, and almost never the endings. She operates solely in the present, responding to people’s paranoia and panic, sending help to strangers who will never hear her voice. She runs checks on license plates, scours reports of past calls, radios deputies to make sure they’re safe. She tells them when back-up might arrive. She helps officers figure out which calls to respond to and in what order. “So a dog breeder? A fraud call?” Swetson asks as her shift starts at 2:20 p.m. “It’s a mobile home park there, right? Let me get the lot number.” Her official title is Public Safety Telecommunicator. Then that person alerts Swetson, who relays information to deputies on the road. When a caller dials 911, someone in this room picks up. So many calls, so many crises, and here - like in emergency call centers across the country - so much need for more dispatchers. This Monday in August, Swetson and her coworkers in Pinellas County’s 911 Regional Communications Center will field 2,837 emergency calls.ĭuring her 8-hour shift, she will hear about a shooter, prowler, alligators - real and imagined. Then she logs on, toggling between five monitors, her mission control. Adjusts her headset, where her tiny talisman, Groot, dangles from the earpiece. She puts her three-ring “bible” of police signals on the desk. “Here, no one is allowed to say: ‘It’s quiet,’ ” says Swetson, 29, sliding into her swivel chair. “Everything else is fine!” the dispatcher says. But we can’t send backup because we’re down three units.” “Deputies are en route to serve a warrant,” a dispatcher tells Brittany Swetson, who has come to start her night shift at the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office. (Photo/Chris Urso via MCT)Īnd in more than 100 cubicles, operators field pending disasters. Swetson has been with the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office for the past two years. Brittany Swetson 29, of Largo is seen at work Monday, Aug.
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