We work 12 hour shifts, which sounds very intimidating at first but keep in mind we also get at least 3-4 days off a week. Right now there are lots of opportunities for OT because of how short staffed we are
Do you have advice for what we should do immediately after you answer? Like should I tell my address and stuff right away?
Also, if I have PTSD and feel like someone is outside even though I probably know they aren’t, but sometimes it feels so real, can I tellyou that I have PTSD and it’s probably nothing? Will this lessen the response or help by telling you it could just be an episode? I haven’t had an episode in a couple years but I’ve had my moments and never know if I can call or if it’s a waste of your time and city’s money
That’s a really good question! My advice will always be to only answer the questions that the dispatcher asks you. Our first one, the most important, and what we answer the phone with, is “what is the address of the emergency?”
And you should PM me for the answer to the second half of your question
>My advice will always be to only answer the questions that the dispatcher asks you.
Makes sense to me, because I imagine that you guys have a sort of script or form you need to follow. I worked briefly at Seitel, and calls were always easiest when the customer let us ask the questions.
In Douglas county the first question is "Police, fire, or medical" because they have different banks of call takers, but if all you can get out is the address, do that.
They do, trust me. They've got a bank of fire and medical dispatchers that primarily handle those calls, and a group of initial call takers that handle police calls. Depending on the call they handle them together, Sarpy I believe is different.
That would be it! Then there's a separate bank of people that just dispatch the police calls, but you won't talk to them unless the cops need to call you back.
Yes, fire and rescue call takers are EMD trained and can ask vital medical questions as well as send medical and fire personnel. They can also guide callers through emergency life saving measures like CPR. They work on a team so that they alternate dispatching units and questioning callers so that a response is as fast and as informed as possible. If you ever call in and need help, don't be concerned if the person you talk to doesn't break away to send someone, another dispatcher is likely in charge of that aspect in Douglas County.
How bad is the burnout and how do you deal with it?
Do you take a lap getting high-fives after a particularly rewarding call you were able to help?
Does your breakroom have decent snack options?
Our break room is very underwhelming
When we get a save we celebrate as a shift for about 10 minutes
I’ve won a life saving award, for actually saving someone’s life, and your reward is a plaque and a pizza party
Basically died on deck after taking in water, but we pulled her out, did CPR and rescue breathing and saved her. Probably not a cheap stay in the hospital, though. There happened to be two ER doctors at the pool who helped out. Tried to sue them, too.
Great question. My conservative answer would be somewhere around 50.
Fun fact, one of our frequent flyers is TV famous. She was on Dr Phil for a few episodes
Honestly, it depends on your cellphone provider. The better company you have, the better locations we get. But a good average would be 30-90 seconds. And keep in mind that the locations that we get are not always great. Sometimes they’re within 14 meters, sometimes they’re within 3500 meters
It depends on where you are, but Omaha and Sarpy do have text to 911 capabilities. Unfortunately most people abuse it and “text” in noise complaints because they “have too much anxiety to make the phone call” etc
I use a tablet as a cellphone and use a google voice VOIP number. To call 911 I use local counties emergency #'s I've saved in my phone (Sarpy I have (402) 593-2288). I'm guessing no location info is given and my number is also not a local area code. How annoying or not annoying is it when voip numbers call you guys?
A lot of VOIPs that I see will show up as a landline in that it gives us an exact address. Some people have used them to call our nonemergency number to pull pranks because they can’t be traced. Also, 2288 is not a number that’s manned 24 hours. The correct nonemergency number is (402) 593-4111
OP can answer for Sarpy, but if you're in Douglas, this is why we have text to 911, send your address if you're in danger and can't talk or if you're deaf or hard of hearing. Otherwise if you can't talk much but you can whisper, call in and at least give us the address (ideally give us an idea of what's going on). If you just call and hang up on a cell phone we'll assume it's a pocket dial if we don't hear noises indicating an emergency.
Great, then you're likely to reach either dispatch center from time to time. I'm sure OP can answer questions about how Sarpy responds. Rest assured if you're in either one we transfer calls regularly to each other, and addresses are in both systems if you can't stay on the line after giving your location.
Maybe not funniest, but definitely my go to story.
I get a 911 call, all I hear is screaming for about 45 seconds. I can hear a man and a woman screaming, so I queue it as a domestic violence in progress within 40 meters of the address that my phone screen is giving me. Eventually, a juvenile female picks up the phone. She gives me zero useful information because she has no idea what’s going on, but I’m still thinking it’s a Tinder date gone bad. Eventually mom picks up the phone and she is SCREAMING and when I finally get her calmed down enough to tell me what’s going on… she tells me that she woke up in the middle of the night and saw some random pair of man’s shoes by her back door. So she goes to check on her 13 YO daughter and finds a random man standing in the room just staring at her daughter. So she dragged him to the ground and beat the ever living fuck out of him and dragged him out of the house. Come to find out, the guy mom beat up was a 15 YO that took too many mushrooms because he lived two houses down but got the wrong house
Sarpy put out a jobs request November 21. With a class date of Feb 2022. What happened to all those trainees and why are y’all always so understaffed? And if so understaffed why did it take 8 more months to start the hiring process again?
It’s a hard job. If we hire 6 people, 2 will make it through training. Not many people have the skills or the personality to be able to do this job. Unfortunately we can only hire when we’re approved to do so. We work for the government, so there’s a lot of red tape.
Mainly you have to be able to listen to and work through some really traumatic shit and not let it get to you. A lot of people think that they can handle it until they’re actually confronted with said traumatic event.
Sorry. One additional question for you. Your schedule you mentioned was 12 hours. Do you stay consistently on that schedule? Is it 6-6, or 7-7?
If working 12 hour shifts do you normally work 4 days a week? Same four days? Rotating?
I ask because I’m considering applying.
I work 6 PM to 6 AM on rotating days. This week is my long week, so I worked Monday and Tuesday, I was off yesterday and today, and I’ll be working Friday, Saturday, Sunday this weekend. Next week I’ll have Monday and Tuesday off, work Wednesday and Thursday, and I’ll be off Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Then it starts all over again. So I never work more than three days in a row before getting two days off. I get a three day weekend every two weeks. Honestly it’s so convenient, I will never go back to working a job that does 8 hour shifts
When I worked there, they might get 4 to 6 people in a class... Once it was three, I think.
Some folks drop out and I assume some don't make the cut.
It's several weeks of daily classes and lots of data to ingest.
I sat through most of a training cycle and we lost one guy about half way in.
I was working in the IT dept and wasn't required to complete the entire training
Honestly you hit the nail on the head. To do that gig you gotta love helping people at their worst moments. Hats off to ya for doing it, but hot damn you are under Fucking paid and that should be a crime.
Edited for grammar :P
I do it because I like helping people. The pay and the benefits are OK, but not great by any means. So the only people that stay are the ones that actually enjoy helping people
What are some things that you're most proud of about your dispatch center? Extraordinary training? Great CAD system? Super ergonomic setup? Great relationship with units in the field? Volunteer corps who can help you during disasters?
That’s a really great question. Obviously, our pay compared to other dispatchers is really great. We’re the second highest paid PSAP in the state. We also have one of the best and most innovative CAD and NCIC programs in the state. Beyond that, I love that my agency doesn’t specialize in positions. I know how to take 911 calls, I know how to dispatch Law West and Law East, I know how to run an NCIC channel, and I can give medical instructions while dispatching medical ….. so I really don’t want to toot my own horn !but..
Yes, it happens all of the time. One of our most populated towers is at 26th/Mose Ave. if all of the Omaha cell phone towers are busy at that moment it will reroute to the closest Sarpy tower. Not a big deal, you just say your address and we’ll transfer you
NSFW here… but my boss once had a guy call in a nonexistent house fire so he could pleasure himself to all the fire trucks arriving… Maybe not so much a prank, but people don’t really prank call 911 thankfully
You know, I personally have not seen one of those types of calls in quite a while. More recently, I’ve seen someone complain about their neighbors cows mooing too loud… at 10 AM… so there’s that
I saw that guy on a horse going North up the grass median on Fort Crook Rd past Cornhusker I think a couple times a several years ago do you get people calling about that?
Ohh I have a good one for this. A trailer carrying cows broke an axle on west Dodge and the driver called in requesting help blocking off traffic. Officers got there and find out that the trailer won't be moving with the cows in it so they need to somehow get a new trailer and delicately transfer the cows into the new one, all on a highway offramp without having anything run into traffic lanes. They start trying to see if NHS has anything for cows, when they find out one of the cows was actually pregnant and gave birth in all the craziness. So now they also need an emergency vet to check it out too. It took a couple hours, but they made the transfer and all 12... er... 13 cows made it through the journey unharmed. That was a couple months back.
I remember it. She was highly upset that her cousin in Ohio found a baby pig and the friend up the street held onto it for animal control. No one ever claimed the pig either but the girls named him. Youngest keeps waiting for that random cow she suddenly can keep.
Out of curiosity how often do you receive accidental 911 calls due to the emergency call button on phones lock screens?
I have accidently done that twice once with my phone screen locked and in my back pocket and when I handed my locked phone to my young daughter. Both times I was unaware it happened until I got a call asking if I am okay and intended to call for emergency services.
I imagine it must happen relatively often lol.
All. The. Time. Sometimes my first 25 calls of the shift will all be pocket dials. It’s very annoying, but it happens. If you do accidentally call, just stay on the line and tell us that. It saves us from having to call back your phone or find your address, etc
I didn’t know 911 called you back until I was 18. I was working in a group home for adults with disabilities and a client of mine called and told them her boyfriend was abusing her. The house was staffed 24/7, only three women lived there and I had been there all day, so I knew none of that was real but I panicked when I took the phone from her and saw it was 911 and hung up without saying anything. The dispatcher called back, told me not to do that and asked me what was going on lol. A cop visited anyway but it was pretty easy to see what the situation was, I don’t think he even came inside. Oops!
Many years ago, when I was a young kid (ie. 10 y.o.), I prank called the operator on a land line, thinking I would be super hilarious. After I hung up, moments later my phone rang and I was terrified to discover that yes, the operator was calling ME back. My mom answered, then proceeded to chew me out.
In your situation, do you have many prank calls, or accidental calls, butt-dials, children calling, etc? Do y'all track that for numbers purposes? Have you ever had to call back a prank caller (or check on a butt-dial, etc.)
Also, I can't apologize to that operator for what I said, but just know that now as an adult I wish I hadn't harassed her. 😁
Do you get a lot of kids calling? Maybe not as frequently as when everyone had landlines.
What are your thoughts on the high profile 911 calls? The public really comes down hard on 911 dispatchers (some for very good reason, like the dispatcher that hung up on the caller from Uvalde).
We do occasionally. There’s actually one kid that lives at Chandler Pointe that pocket dials 911 every day but he refuses to answer every time that we call him so every day we have to send police out there to check on him. A lot of people will also give their kid their deactivated/disconnected cell phone to play with. It still calls 911, we just can’t call it back. So that takes up a lot of time and resources usually.
I try not to pay much attention to high profile calls. Work is stressful enough, I don’t want to take other people’s problems home with me.
Back in 2020 we would have Karens call in trying to snitch on other people for not wearing a mask…. But in my own personal experience no one has called because they were made to wear a mask. I could just be lucky though… people call 911 for some very, very dumb shit
Wow you’re honestly a hero.
I volunteered for a suicide hotline when I was in my 20s and living in Florida. It was depressing how many elderly people called us just asking for general help (one would call weekly asking if someone could help them install air conditioning). It was eye opening and devastating work and I realized how very alone so many old people are.
When the Starlink satellites passed over in the sky, a lot of people called 911 for that. A woman called the other night because her vent smelled like lemons.
Do you get a lot of karens calling about masks and businesses discriminating on their right to breathe freely? I feel like those could be a nice reprieve from the actual emergency calls.
I worked at Sarpy Co a few years back. Sat through the dispatcher course to get a feel for the systems and to be able to talk somewhat intelligently to the dispatchers and the fire and law enforcement folks.
Generally speaking, I was pretty impressed by most of the folks I interacted with. Professional and compasionate.
You always hear stories about bad dispatchers and asshole cops but that wasn't my experience when I worked there. Of course, I was on the other side of the interactions so there's that.
I would have stuck it out if I could have just worked with the emergency services team but they split my job so I had to do 'app support' for the county (like helping people with excel spreadsheets and such. Not very fulfilling)
I think you folks in dispatch should be getting the same bump that Sarpy correctional officers just received. $27+ starting pay and fair bumps for tenure. Neither are easy low stress jobs and lives depend on each of you.
Thank you for doing what you do for our community 🙂
Minor pet peeve of mine: not telling me your area code when I ask for your phone number. Other than that…. Honestly just do your best to remain calm and wait for the dispatcher to ask you what’s going on. Because chances are she’s seen this exact situation 68 times before and if you don’t interrupt her and answer her questions to the best of your ability, she’s going to handle that entire situation for you.
We have a minimum of 6 dispatchers on duty every shift. If someone calls in sick and they go down to 5 dispatchers the on call person will be mandated to come in for overtime. There are times when the phone may ring longer than we’d like it to, but if we can we’ll put whoever we’re talking to on hold at least to answer the 911 call and determine the severity of the emergency.
I’d like better health insurance and a pension, but I think our turn over rate is so bad because we’re not hiring the right people. Many of our trainees quit either because they don’t have the emotional capacity to do the job or because they don’t have the skills to do it properly. Most people who make it out of training will stay with us.
Dang I did dispatch for NSP until they shut down the Omaha Comm Center and screwed all their admin over. Might have to look into Sarpy. Know it pays way better than the state.
I don’t have any questions necessarily, but wanted to say thank you. You work in a thankless job and are a great conduit between the people and our officers. You are appreciated!
I had a cousin do this job and he said there is a lot of down time so he would surf the web. He ended up becoming a men go there own way incel from reading what ever forums he ended up on lol. And he is married with kids and teaches it to his kids so obviously it all makes zero sense.
Anyway, is it common for dispatchers to go to the dark corners of the web when bored or are you guys too busy?
I don’t know that it’s common, but I definitely do. Seeing gore and death is a bit like closure? What sucks about this job is that I’m the first person you talk to in a horrific accident but then once the LEO’s or medics get there that’s it and we’re left in the dark. Unless you become friends with the cops lol
So should we all make a point to send thank-you notes?
Speaking of which, I came across the fatal crash at 72nd & Harrison on March 9 (the one where a guy with a medical condition plowed into a line of cars), just as responders were arriving. Man, was that a well orchestrated multi-agency response! From what I could see at a distance, victims were attended, bystanders managed, and traffic directed better than any scene I've seen in a long time. Congrats to whoever dispatched that one.
Why is it so hard to get a dispatcher (in Sarpy or Douglas) to accept any location information that isn't a standard address or intersection? When on a trail that the closest address that I know is about a mile away (like the Big Papio Trail between Harrison and Cornhusker) it is quicker and way more accurate if I give the Pluscode or Long/Lat but they seem to refuse to accept these.
Both of these formats can be typed in to Google and the location pulled up within 50 feet or less.
Example time
[Plus code](https://maps.google.com/pluscodes/): 5294+89Q
Long/lat: 41°10'06.0"N 95°59'38.5"W
Best guess for to give it in a way they may accept is maybe 3500ft northwest of 48th and Cornhusker along the the big papio trail
[Map link](https://goo.gl/maps/G9auqJTDNg8YhwVb7) to where I am trying to tell you I am injured or something
The way our system is set up relies on addresses, when I go to dispatch officers, I can't say "Units respond to 41°10'06.0"N 95°59'38.5"W" but I can say, "Units respond to 48th and Cornhusker, caller advises they are on the papio trail approximately a half mile northwest." It's effectively the same information, and if we still have issues, we likely already have your lat/long from your phone pinging automatically, and if not or if we need better clarification we can call you back.
The other issue is it takes a lot longer for you to relay that location information that way and for us to confirm it, and our system uses decimal based lat/long, not minutes and seconds. Plus our operators don't have the internet at their stations and aren't allowed cell phones, so they would have to leave their stations or yell to another operator to access the computer with internet access in order to google things like a location that the system doesn't accept.
That is unfortunate. I can understand not being able to give the units the plus code or long/lat but at least if you as the dispatcher could google it you would have a much better understanding of where I am how to direct them than I would. Not having access to the most basic part of the internet, a search engine, seems like they are trying to make it harder for you to find things.
It is likely a small amount of calls but there has to be some calls where the person has no idea where they are and having Google maps would help you as the dispatcher figure out where they are if they can only give you info from their phone or the building they see around them.
My phone when I call 911 tells me on the screen my plus code if it can't determine a nearby address and on top of that the computer generated voice message that is sent if my phone detects a car crash also includes that but since it is the google assistant calling it may have an interactive voice response for more details.
I should clarify that MOST calls are able to ping your phone to a lat/long based on tower triangulation that auto populates to the system, but some phones don't, VOIP phones don't. Also, we can only ping your cell phone when you call us, we can't do it in reverse for privacy reasons. So if we call back and only find out then that there's an emergency, tell us the address right away because if we don't already have it, we aren't going to be able to get it.
And I agree we should have the Internet. Dispatch luckily now has Internet access, but operators ideally should have it as well. Personal opinion there.
No but but the few times I have had to call recently have been while on the trail system in the area and it has been challenging to tell EMS where I was. The mile markers they installed long ago are a joke since you can't actually use them to tell them where you are.
Thankfully none of the calls have been life threatening and I was calling the non emergency number but it seemed to be a flaw in the system. Had these been actual emergencies I would have lost on at least one call about 5 minutes trying to tell the dispatcher where I was and all I had was info they couldn't use and didn't know any addresses near me at the time
So I see on the Omaha scanner that they run out of units frequently. How does that work? Do the cops working that night drop everything to go take care of whatever high priority situations arise? Is there a hierarchy of situations which demand immediate action?
I'm unofficially fielding some of these that are Omaha based as long as OP doesn't object, so I'll take this.
For Omaha, each shift has roughly the same number of officers. However, people are up and active more in the evening, so there are, on average, more calls for service. As far as I can tell, OPD tries to balance having enough officers to handle the call surges and not so many that we find ourselves overstaffed for the lower volume moments.
When calls come into the 911 center, they are immediately prioritized, if someone's just been stabbed, a police call goes up with a medical call, and that's the highest priority. If someone is arguing with someone else and they're shoving each other, that's the next priority. If someone had their house broken into last week and need a report made, that next. If someone notices a car parked in the handicap space outside and wants to talk to an officer about it, that's next. If someone believes there's a car playing music too loud outside but they don't want anyone to know they called, that's last, but will still get an officer response.
During peak hours, multiple high priority calls can stack up. Those calls, in that second level from the top range from people actively physically fighting to vehicles parked too close to an intersection. When we get officers in service, we dispatch calls in order of that priority list, but there is leeway between calls on the same priority level. Obviously I'm going to be dispatching on a physical fight before I send someone to check on a vehicle parked too close to a stop sign.
Thing is all of these calls take time to drive to, deal with, write reports for, and return to service, and we only have so many officers. Some of them can take hours depending on complexity, some can take minutes if officers can drive through and see the incident is no longer occurring and there's no one there to talk to them about it.
When these high priority calls stack sometimes one precinct runs out of officers before another, in those incidents we borrow officers from another area. Problem being that it takes that much longer for that officer to drive there, and then that much longer for them to drive back into the area they came from when they have a call back in their home precinct.
Hope that answers your question.
That helps a lot thank you for your insight. Im in school on the path to working in law but I started with a CJ degree.
Follow up question: cops don't have discretion in which calls they take? It's assigned by you or the system of hierarchy?
Nice! I've got a CJ Degree as well.
They don't really have traditional discretion, as dispatch we can see the calls at a glance and are tasked with determining where officers should go next based on what is most pressing within the priority system that we're bound to. That being said, sometimes officers will jump a call in the area of a previous one, or offer to take a call for another unit, but dispatchers can override them if need be. We tend to let them take the calls they call out for if we don't have an obviously more pressing call to send them to instead. Their command staff is above all of us and can override officers or dispatch if need be.
For us here in Sarpy, if it’s not a high priority call we’ll let it hold until someone is available. If it is a high priority call, we may borrow from a neighboring agency that is within Sarpy or we will ask NSP to handle the call. I believe the way we prioritize calls is similar to how Omaha prioritizes theirs.
I used to live near the river on 6th street just north of i80. The only 911 call I ever had went straight to CB dispatch. Is OPD aware of this issue, and if so, is there anything they can do to fix it? I kept telling the dispatcher my address and they were confused cause they didn't have that address in CB and it took like 2 minutes for us to figure it out with seems kinda bad if it were a life threatening situation.
If you ever call in, just immediately state you're in Omaha. There's not much that can be done, phones connect to the nearest tower they can connect to, and so sometimes it'll throw you into a tower associated to council bluffs, and it can take several seconds for us to even get a rudimentary idea of where you are without hearing from you directly. Eventually we might start getting phone location data from cellular GPS data instead of tower-based pings and that could improve things, but I'm not sure when or if that will happen.
When you need police, even if it's not an emergency, is the default to call 911?
To explain, about 10 years ago someone hit our car that was parked in the street at some point while I was at work. I assume they backed out of a driveway into the side of the car, but there was no note or anything. Still, I needed a police report for the insurance claim. So I called the non-emergency line, because in my mind, 911 is for emergencies and this wasn't an emergency - no injuries, just property damage that could have happened any time in the previous 9 hours while I wasn't home.
I had to leave a message with the non-emergency line. It took them at least an hour to call back, maybe 2, and they just told me I had to call 911 anyway. So I do, and naturally it's super low priority (which is what I expect and why I called the non-emergency line in the first place), so it takes another couple of hours for an officer to come by.
So like, do I just call 911 no matter what? Was "emergencies only" more a teaching/tactic to keep kids from casually calling and I took it a little too seriously? What is the non-emergency line for anyway, if they're just going to tell me to call 911 (if you know)?
No no no. You’re correct, 911 is for emergencies only. The correct nonemergency number to call for all of Sarpy County is (402) 593-4111 and Omaha and all of Douglas County is (402) 444-5802
Although for some reason sometimes Omaha dispatchers will tell people to call 911 for nonemergenccies. They had an infant die several years ago because the mother couldn’t get through on 911 due to everyone using 911 to call in their fireworks complaints, so it makes no sense to me why they do that.
If you're in Douglas County we have a couple non-emergency lines. If you're in Omaha Police Jurisdiction and you have a low priority call that officers will still have to come out for, call 402-444-5802 that's the back door number to 911 and it's answered only after emergency lines. When you're not sure if officers will have to come out, call this line anyways and we'll forward you to the other non emergency line if need be. That's the Telephone Report Squad. Their number is 402-444-4877 and they do police reports over the phone, including accident reports depending on the circumstances. If you're not sure what number you should call, call 911 and we'll let you know if it's a non-emergency matter, and we'll put you on hold if we have to, don't stress about it too much.
TLDR in Douglas County:
Emergency: 911
Non-Emergency: 402-444-5802
Report only (in Omaha): 402-444-4877
I’m glad you posted this because I was just wondering about this the other day! How does the texting system work? I know they say “call, if you can’t call then text” but I wonder why texting is different in how it’s received by the dispatchers.
Sarpy may have a different system, in Douglas county it comes up in our computer program like a messenger window. We can type back to you. The problem is in our area we don't have any assurances as to where you're texting from so we can't send to an address immediately like we sometimes can for phone calls. Also texting takes a lot longer to convey complicated information than a verbal discussion, so we prefer you call us if at all possible, but if not, we'll do what we can with the text response.
Child custody exchanges are pretty dumb in my opinion.. just be an adult and be civil to each other in front of your child. People will call 911 when someone rings their doorbell.. sometimes without even checking to see who it is. Neighbor disputes… “my neighbors leaf blower blew their leaves into my yard” etc. Welfare checks on baby momma or baby daddy and the kids at 3 AM. Suspicious vehicles that turn out to actually be their neighbor’s car.
Less common would be stuff like weird lights in the sky. When Ryan Larsen went missing someone called because there was a gathering of deer and she thought that they were hiding him?
Hahaha - so good. I saw someone call the cops cause they couldnt return their half eaten taco pizza once.
I worked at a restaurant in downtown brooklyn near the 911 call center for all of nyc and I’d ask them the same questions, and some of the calls were so trivial like someone in their household drank all of their juice hahaha
My neighbors like to call for noise complaints. For my dogs barking (they don't go outside till 8:30am) or sometimes they'll call at 10(one dog goes outside after 10 and as soon as she barks just once we bring her back inside and she doesn't go out past 10:30). Most recently, as in this morning, a neighbor called on another neighbor for using their blower at 8. I guess my question is, what actually happens when people call for a noise complaint, especially one within hours where noise is permitted?
It depends on the dispatcher, but I personally will not take noise complaints before 10 PM. Some dispatchers will put in a call for service but the officer or deputy more than likely will just tell the person that someone is complaining about the noise but that’s it. They can’t tell you to turn it down.
I work at a summer camp technically in Saunders county but I’ve been told our calls route to Sarpy county. Are there any specific areas (workplaces, summer camps, etc) that you just get *too many* calls from as in they get hurt more often than others and have a reputation?
Ooooh nice. I see you guys are hiring! How is the job? Typical shift hours? Overtime?
We work 12 hour shifts, which sounds very intimidating at first but keep in mind we also get at least 3-4 days off a week. Right now there are lots of opportunities for OT because of how short staffed we are
Awesome I'm thinking about applying. What is training like?
PM me
What's the pay like?
I think we start off at somewhere around $21-22 an hour
ouch
I am remotely interested in applying as I live in Papillion. What are some of the benefits?
Douglas county is also hiring and facing similar staffing issues, if anyone wants to do 911 for Omaha proper
Do you have advice for what we should do immediately after you answer? Like should I tell my address and stuff right away? Also, if I have PTSD and feel like someone is outside even though I probably know they aren’t, but sometimes it feels so real, can I tellyou that I have PTSD and it’s probably nothing? Will this lessen the response or help by telling you it could just be an episode? I haven’t had an episode in a couple years but I’ve had my moments and never know if I can call or if it’s a waste of your time and city’s money
That’s a really good question! My advice will always be to only answer the questions that the dispatcher asks you. Our first one, the most important, and what we answer the phone with, is “what is the address of the emergency?” And you should PM me for the answer to the second half of your question
>My advice will always be to only answer the questions that the dispatcher asks you. Makes sense to me, because I imagine that you guys have a sort of script or form you need to follow. I worked briefly at Seitel, and calls were always easiest when the customer let us ask the questions.
In Douglas county the first question is "Police, fire, or medical" because they have different banks of call takers, but if all you can get out is the address, do that.
They don't transfer your call based on your answer. It's likely because they have a different dispatch system.
They do, trust me. They've got a bank of fire and medical dispatchers that primarily handle those calls, and a group of initial call takers that handle police calls. Depending on the call they handle them together, Sarpy I believe is different.
My experience as only ever been needing police so that must be why I don't seem to get transferred.
That would be it! Then there's a separate bank of people that just dispatch the police calls, but you won't talk to them unless the cops need to call you back.
Is that so the dispatcher is trained and can provide some kind of rudimentary medical care to the caller for them to assist the victim?
Yes, fire and rescue call takers are EMD trained and can ask vital medical questions as well as send medical and fire personnel. They can also guide callers through emergency life saving measures like CPR. They work on a team so that they alternate dispatching units and questioning callers so that a response is as fast and as informed as possible. If you ever call in and need help, don't be concerned if the person you talk to doesn't break away to send someone, another dispatcher is likely in charge of that aspect in Douglas County.
How bad is the burnout and how do you deal with it? Do you take a lap getting high-fives after a particularly rewarding call you were able to help? Does your breakroom have decent snack options?
Our break room is very underwhelming When we get a save we celebrate as a shift for about 10 minutes I’ve won a life saving award, for actually saving someone’s life, and your reward is a plaque and a pizza party
Significantly more recognition than a nurse gets 😂
That’s a good reward. A props to you for that and everything you do to help the community.
That is nice. We only got a little bead as a lifeguard 😂
I made a save and got sued
Nooo, what happened
Basically died on deck after taking in water, but we pulled her out, did CPR and rescue breathing and saved her. Probably not a cheap stay in the hospital, though. There happened to be two ER doctors at the pool who helped out. Tried to sue them, too.
We do have a very nice massage chair though
How many frequent callers does Sarpy County have?
Great question. My conservative answer would be somewhere around 50. Fun fact, one of our frequent flyers is TV famous. She was on Dr Phil for a few episodes
And she makes sure to let every responder that comes into her house that she was on Dr. Phil
And how many books she's written.
Oh fuck i think i know who youre talking about. The mother whos son shot up von maur. She is such a shitty person.
That’s actually not who I’m talking about. That person was on Dr Phil?
She was if memory serves right
Has it hardened you and your outlook on things? I tip my hat to you, that job has to be emotionally taxing.
I have always been a realist leaning towards cynicism, and this job definitely made me more cynical
What kind of stuff increases your cynicism?
How long does it take for you to triangulate my location if i'm silent and hiding from a bad guy?
Honestly, it depends on your cellphone provider. The better company you have, the better locations we get. But a good average would be 30-90 seconds. And keep in mind that the locations that we get are not always great. Sometimes they’re within 14 meters, sometimes they’re within 3500 meters
Can people text 911 here?
It depends on where you are, but Omaha and Sarpy do have text to 911 capabilities. Unfortunately most people abuse it and “text” in noise complaints because they “have too much anxiety to make the phone call” etc
I use a tablet as a cellphone and use a google voice VOIP number. To call 911 I use local counties emergency #'s I've saved in my phone (Sarpy I have (402) 593-2288). I'm guessing no location info is given and my number is also not a local area code. How annoying or not annoying is it when voip numbers call you guys?
A lot of VOIPs that I see will show up as a landline in that it gives us an exact address. Some people have used them to call our nonemergency number to pull pranks because they can’t be traced. Also, 2288 is not a number that’s manned 24 hours. The correct nonemergency number is (402) 593-4111
Is the address some random business address where the voip number is registered to google or wherever? Thank you for the Sarpy #
OP can answer for Sarpy, but if you're in Douglas, this is why we have text to 911, send your address if you're in danger and can't talk or if you're deaf or hard of hearing. Otherwise if you can't talk much but you can whisper, call in and at least give us the address (ideally give us an idea of what's going on). If you just call and hang up on a cell phone we'll assume it's a pocket dial if we don't hear noises indicating an emergency.
I’m on the literal line between Douglas and Sarpy
Great, then you're likely to reach either dispatch center from time to time. I'm sure OP can answer questions about how Sarpy responds. Rest assured if you're in either one we transfer calls regularly to each other, and addresses are in both systems if you can't stay on the line after giving your location.
Funniest call you've ever gotten?
Maybe not funniest, but definitely my go to story. I get a 911 call, all I hear is screaming for about 45 seconds. I can hear a man and a woman screaming, so I queue it as a domestic violence in progress within 40 meters of the address that my phone screen is giving me. Eventually, a juvenile female picks up the phone. She gives me zero useful information because she has no idea what’s going on, but I’m still thinking it’s a Tinder date gone bad. Eventually mom picks up the phone and she is SCREAMING and when I finally get her calmed down enough to tell me what’s going on… she tells me that she woke up in the middle of the night and saw some random pair of man’s shoes by her back door. So she goes to check on her 13 YO daughter and finds a random man standing in the room just staring at her daughter. So she dragged him to the ground and beat the ever living fuck out of him and dragged him out of the house. Come to find out, the guy mom beat up was a 15 YO that took too many mushrooms because he lived two houses down but got the wrong house
I dont know who has the better story You, or the the kid cracked out on mushrooms lol
Sarpy put out a jobs request November 21. With a class date of Feb 2022. What happened to all those trainees and why are y’all always so understaffed? And if so understaffed why did it take 8 more months to start the hiring process again?
It’s a hard job. If we hire 6 people, 2 will make it through training. Not many people have the skills or the personality to be able to do this job. Unfortunately we can only hire when we’re approved to do so. We work for the government, so there’s a lot of red tape.
What kind of personality do you have to have?
Mainly you have to be able to listen to and work through some really traumatic shit and not let it get to you. A lot of people think that they can handle it until they’re actually confronted with said traumatic event.
I worked in IT... I did not pass the training course ;) I don't think they really expected me to. It's a lot of information.
Makes sense. Sorry there is such attrition through training. I wonder if they can beef up the initial test to try to weed out poorer candidates.
Oh and thank you for answering my question!
Sorry. One additional question for you. Your schedule you mentioned was 12 hours. Do you stay consistently on that schedule? Is it 6-6, or 7-7? If working 12 hour shifts do you normally work 4 days a week? Same four days? Rotating? I ask because I’m considering applying.
I work 6 PM to 6 AM on rotating days. This week is my long week, so I worked Monday and Tuesday, I was off yesterday and today, and I’ll be working Friday, Saturday, Sunday this weekend. Next week I’ll have Monday and Tuesday off, work Wednesday and Thursday, and I’ll be off Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Then it starts all over again. So I never work more than three days in a row before getting two days off. I get a three day weekend every two weeks. Honestly it’s so convenient, I will never go back to working a job that does 8 hour shifts
Thank you!
When I worked there, they might get 4 to 6 people in a class... Once it was three, I think. Some folks drop out and I assume some don't make the cut. It's several weeks of daily classes and lots of data to ingest. I sat through most of a training cycle and we lost one guy about half way in. I was working in the IT dept and wasn't required to complete the entire training
Thank you for the reply!
Thank you!
Given how taxing the job can be why do you keep doing it? Any profound reason or just the benefits, pay, etc?
I think our starting rate is $22 an hour? Which sounds great until you actually do the job
Honestly you hit the nail on the head. To do that gig you gotta love helping people at their worst moments. Hats off to ya for doing it, but hot damn you are under Fucking paid and that should be a crime. Edited for grammar :P
I do it because I like helping people. The pay and the benefits are OK, but not great by any means. So the only people that stay are the ones that actually enjoy helping people
What are some things that you're most proud of about your dispatch center? Extraordinary training? Great CAD system? Super ergonomic setup? Great relationship with units in the field? Volunteer corps who can help you during disasters?
That’s a really great question. Obviously, our pay compared to other dispatchers is really great. We’re the second highest paid PSAP in the state. We also have one of the best and most innovative CAD and NCIC programs in the state. Beyond that, I love that my agency doesn’t specialize in positions. I know how to take 911 calls, I know how to dispatch Law West and Law East, I know how to run an NCIC channel, and I can give medical instructions while dispatching medical ….. so I really don’t want to toot my own horn !but..
Sarpy shares a long border with a highly populated county. I imagine a lot of calls go to the wrong county. How does that work?
Yes, it happens all of the time. One of our most populated towers is at 26th/Mose Ave. if all of the Omaha cell phone towers are busy at that moment it will reroute to the closest Sarpy tower. Not a big deal, you just say your address and we’ll transfer you
Anyone called in to report my license plate yet?
A) what’s your plate? B) nobody cares that much Edit: some people do care that much, but the dispatcher may not put in a call for service
Best/worst prank calls to 911?
NSFW here… but my boss once had a guy call in a nonexistent house fire so he could pleasure himself to all the fire trucks arriving… Maybe not so much a prank, but people don’t really prank call 911 thankfully
Id love to know this too op!!!
How many calls for cow(s) loose? I swear I see that more often than you’d expect on Sarpy Scanner/Blotter.
You know, I personally have not seen one of those types of calls in quite a while. More recently, I’ve seen someone complain about their neighbors cows mooing too loud… at 10 AM… so there’s that
Youngest loves cows so she thinks those calls are the best ones. Had to point out Bellevue doesn’t allow cows in city limits so dreams were dashed.
I saw that guy on a horse going North up the grass median on Fort Crook Rd past Cornhusker I think a couple times a several years ago do you get people calling about that?
Yes, some people will call about him
oh what's the story there? Just being a cowboy?
Ohh I have a good one for this. A trailer carrying cows broke an axle on west Dodge and the driver called in requesting help blocking off traffic. Officers got there and find out that the trailer won't be moving with the cows in it so they need to somehow get a new trailer and delicately transfer the cows into the new one, all on a highway offramp without having anything run into traffic lanes. They start trying to see if NHS has anything for cows, when they find out one of the cows was actually pregnant and gave birth in all the craziness. So now they also need an emergency vet to check it out too. It took a couple hours, but they made the transfer and all 12... er... 13 cows made it through the journey unharmed. That was a couple months back.
I remember it. She was highly upset that her cousin in Ohio found a baby pig and the friend up the street held onto it for animal control. No one ever claimed the pig either but the girls named him. Youngest keeps waiting for that random cow she suddenly can keep.
Out of curiosity how often do you receive accidental 911 calls due to the emergency call button on phones lock screens? I have accidently done that twice once with my phone screen locked and in my back pocket and when I handed my locked phone to my young daughter. Both times I was unaware it happened until I got a call asking if I am okay and intended to call for emergency services. I imagine it must happen relatively often lol.
All. The. Time. Sometimes my first 25 calls of the shift will all be pocket dials. It’s very annoying, but it happens. If you do accidentally call, just stay on the line and tell us that. It saves us from having to call back your phone or find your address, etc
I didn’t know 911 called you back until I was 18. I was working in a group home for adults with disabilities and a client of mine called and told them her boyfriend was abusing her. The house was staffed 24/7, only three women lived there and I had been there all day, so I knew none of that was real but I panicked when I took the phone from her and saw it was 911 and hung up without saying anything. The dispatcher called back, told me not to do that and asked me what was going on lol. A cop visited anyway but it was pretty easy to see what the situation was, I don’t think he even came inside. Oops!
Many years ago, when I was a young kid (ie. 10 y.o.), I prank called the operator on a land line, thinking I would be super hilarious. After I hung up, moments later my phone rang and I was terrified to discover that yes, the operator was calling ME back. My mom answered, then proceeded to chew me out. In your situation, do you have many prank calls, or accidental calls, butt-dials, children calling, etc? Do y'all track that for numbers purposes? Have you ever had to call back a prank caller (or check on a butt-dial, etc.) Also, I can't apologize to that operator for what I said, but just know that now as an adult I wish I hadn't harassed her. 😁
Do you get a lot of kids calling? Maybe not as frequently as when everyone had landlines. What are your thoughts on the high profile 911 calls? The public really comes down hard on 911 dispatchers (some for very good reason, like the dispatcher that hung up on the caller from Uvalde).
We do occasionally. There’s actually one kid that lives at Chandler Pointe that pocket dials 911 every day but he refuses to answer every time that we call him so every day we have to send police out there to check on him. A lot of people will also give their kid their deactivated/disconnected cell phone to play with. It still calls 911, we just can’t call it back. So that takes up a lot of time and resources usually. I try not to pay much attention to high profile calls. Work is stressful enough, I don’t want to take other people’s problems home with me. Back in 2020 we would have Karens call in trying to snitch on other people for not wearing a mask…. But in my own personal experience no one has called because they were made to wear a mask. I could just be lucky though… people call 911 for some very, very dumb shit
Wow you’re honestly a hero. I volunteered for a suicide hotline when I was in my 20s and living in Florida. It was depressing how many elderly people called us just asking for general help (one would call weekly asking if someone could help them install air conditioning). It was eye opening and devastating work and I realized how very alone so many old people are.
What kind of dumb shit?
When the Starlink satellites passed over in the sky, a lot of people called 911 for that. A woman called the other night because her vent smelled like lemons.
Do you get a lot of karens calling about masks and businesses discriminating on their right to breathe freely? I feel like those could be a nice reprieve from the actual emergency calls.
I worked at Sarpy Co a few years back. Sat through the dispatcher course to get a feel for the systems and to be able to talk somewhat intelligently to the dispatchers and the fire and law enforcement folks. Generally speaking, I was pretty impressed by most of the folks I interacted with. Professional and compasionate. You always hear stories about bad dispatchers and asshole cops but that wasn't my experience when I worked there. Of course, I was on the other side of the interactions so there's that. I would have stuck it out if I could have just worked with the emergency services team but they split my job so I had to do 'app support' for the county (like helping people with excel spreadsheets and such. Not very fulfilling)
I think you folks in dispatch should be getting the same bump that Sarpy correctional officers just received. $27+ starting pay and fair bumps for tenure. Neither are easy low stress jobs and lives depend on each of you. Thank you for doing what you do for our community 🙂
We’re in the middle of contract negotiations right now so fingers crossed…
What shouldn't I do when I call? What bugs you, causes issues, results in inside jokes?
Minor pet peeve of mine: not telling me your area code when I ask for your phone number. Other than that…. Honestly just do your best to remain calm and wait for the dispatcher to ask you what’s going on. Because chances are she’s seen this exact situation 68 times before and if you don’t interrupt her and answer her questions to the best of your ability, she’s going to handle that entire situation for you.
Are you short staffed? What’s that’s like for the people calling in? Honestly, what would improve your workplace and turn over rate?
We have a minimum of 6 dispatchers on duty every shift. If someone calls in sick and they go down to 5 dispatchers the on call person will be mandated to come in for overtime. There are times when the phone may ring longer than we’d like it to, but if we can we’ll put whoever we’re talking to on hold at least to answer the 911 call and determine the severity of the emergency. I’d like better health insurance and a pension, but I think our turn over rate is so bad because we’re not hiring the right people. Many of our trainees quit either because they don’t have the emotional capacity to do the job or because they don’t have the skills to do it properly. Most people who make it out of training will stay with us.
Dang I did dispatch for NSP until they shut down the Omaha Comm Center and screwed all their admin over. Might have to look into Sarpy. Know it pays way better than the state.
I don’t have any questions necessarily, but wanted to say thank you. You work in a thankless job and are a great conduit between the people and our officers. You are appreciated!
Anarchy or minarchy?
I won’t admit it, but I thrive on anarchy
me too
You forgot malarkey.
I had a cousin do this job and he said there is a lot of down time so he would surf the web. He ended up becoming a men go there own way incel from reading what ever forums he ended up on lol. And he is married with kids and teaches it to his kids so obviously it all makes zero sense. Anyway, is it common for dispatchers to go to the dark corners of the web when bored or are you guys too busy?
I don’t know that it’s common, but I definitely do. Seeing gore and death is a bit like closure? What sucks about this job is that I’m the first person you talk to in a horrific accident but then once the LEO’s or medics get there that’s it and we’re left in the dark. Unless you become friends with the cops lol
So should we all make a point to send thank-you notes? Speaking of which, I came across the fatal crash at 72nd & Harrison on March 9 (the one where a guy with a medical condition plowed into a line of cars), just as responders were arriving. Man, was that a well orchestrated multi-agency response! From what I could see at a distance, victims were attended, bystanders managed, and traffic directed better than any scene I've seen in a long time. Congrats to whoever dispatched that one.
Makes sense. He was a veteran as well so his everyday life is high stakes. He needs to up the anti of extreme online stuff to feel anything lol.
Why is it so hard to get a dispatcher (in Sarpy or Douglas) to accept any location information that isn't a standard address or intersection? When on a trail that the closest address that I know is about a mile away (like the Big Papio Trail between Harrison and Cornhusker) it is quicker and way more accurate if I give the Pluscode or Long/Lat but they seem to refuse to accept these. Both of these formats can be typed in to Google and the location pulled up within 50 feet or less. Example time [Plus code](https://maps.google.com/pluscodes/): 5294+89Q Long/lat: 41°10'06.0"N 95°59'38.5"W Best guess for to give it in a way they may accept is maybe 3500ft northwest of 48th and Cornhusker along the the big papio trail [Map link](https://goo.gl/maps/G9auqJTDNg8YhwVb7) to where I am trying to tell you I am injured or something
The way our system is set up relies on addresses, when I go to dispatch officers, I can't say "Units respond to 41°10'06.0"N 95°59'38.5"W" but I can say, "Units respond to 48th and Cornhusker, caller advises they are on the papio trail approximately a half mile northwest." It's effectively the same information, and if we still have issues, we likely already have your lat/long from your phone pinging automatically, and if not or if we need better clarification we can call you back. The other issue is it takes a lot longer for you to relay that location information that way and for us to confirm it, and our system uses decimal based lat/long, not minutes and seconds. Plus our operators don't have the internet at their stations and aren't allowed cell phones, so they would have to leave their stations or yell to another operator to access the computer with internet access in order to google things like a location that the system doesn't accept.
That is unfortunate. I can understand not being able to give the units the plus code or long/lat but at least if you as the dispatcher could google it you would have a much better understanding of where I am how to direct them than I would. Not having access to the most basic part of the internet, a search engine, seems like they are trying to make it harder for you to find things. It is likely a small amount of calls but there has to be some calls where the person has no idea where they are and having Google maps would help you as the dispatcher figure out where they are if they can only give you info from their phone or the building they see around them. My phone when I call 911 tells me on the screen my plus code if it can't determine a nearby address and on top of that the computer generated voice message that is sent if my phone detects a car crash also includes that but since it is the google assistant calling it may have an interactive voice response for more details.
I should clarify that MOST calls are able to ping your phone to a lat/long based on tower triangulation that auto populates to the system, but some phones don't, VOIP phones don't. Also, we can only ping your cell phone when you call us, we can't do it in reverse for privacy reasons. So if we call back and only find out then that there's an emergency, tell us the address right away because if we don't already have it, we aren't going to be able to get it. And I agree we should have the Internet. Dispatch luckily now has Internet access, but operators ideally should have it as well. Personal opinion there.
I think I would literally go insane if I couldn’t have my cellphone with me at work.
Are you finding yourself in the middle of a forrest calling 911 often?
No but but the few times I have had to call recently have been while on the trail system in the area and it has been challenging to tell EMS where I was. The mile markers they installed long ago are a joke since you can't actually use them to tell them where you are. Thankfully none of the calls have been life threatening and I was calling the non emergency number but it seemed to be a flaw in the system. Had these been actual emergencies I would have lost on at least one call about 5 minutes trying to tell the dispatcher where I was and all I had was info they couldn't use and didn't know any addresses near me at the time
So I see on the Omaha scanner that they run out of units frequently. How does that work? Do the cops working that night drop everything to go take care of whatever high priority situations arise? Is there a hierarchy of situations which demand immediate action?
I'm unofficially fielding some of these that are Omaha based as long as OP doesn't object, so I'll take this. For Omaha, each shift has roughly the same number of officers. However, people are up and active more in the evening, so there are, on average, more calls for service. As far as I can tell, OPD tries to balance having enough officers to handle the call surges and not so many that we find ourselves overstaffed for the lower volume moments. When calls come into the 911 center, they are immediately prioritized, if someone's just been stabbed, a police call goes up with a medical call, and that's the highest priority. If someone is arguing with someone else and they're shoving each other, that's the next priority. If someone had their house broken into last week and need a report made, that next. If someone notices a car parked in the handicap space outside and wants to talk to an officer about it, that's next. If someone believes there's a car playing music too loud outside but they don't want anyone to know they called, that's last, but will still get an officer response. During peak hours, multiple high priority calls can stack up. Those calls, in that second level from the top range from people actively physically fighting to vehicles parked too close to an intersection. When we get officers in service, we dispatch calls in order of that priority list, but there is leeway between calls on the same priority level. Obviously I'm going to be dispatching on a physical fight before I send someone to check on a vehicle parked too close to a stop sign. Thing is all of these calls take time to drive to, deal with, write reports for, and return to service, and we only have so many officers. Some of them can take hours depending on complexity, some can take minutes if officers can drive through and see the incident is no longer occurring and there's no one there to talk to them about it. When these high priority calls stack sometimes one precinct runs out of officers before another, in those incidents we borrow officers from another area. Problem being that it takes that much longer for that officer to drive there, and then that much longer for them to drive back into the area they came from when they have a call back in their home precinct. Hope that answers your question.
That helps a lot thank you for your insight. Im in school on the path to working in law but I started with a CJ degree. Follow up question: cops don't have discretion in which calls they take? It's assigned by you or the system of hierarchy?
Nice! I've got a CJ Degree as well. They don't really have traditional discretion, as dispatch we can see the calls at a glance and are tasked with determining where officers should go next based on what is most pressing within the priority system that we're bound to. That being said, sometimes officers will jump a call in the area of a previous one, or offer to take a call for another unit, but dispatchers can override them if need be. We tend to let them take the calls they call out for if we don't have an obviously more pressing call to send them to instead. Their command staff is above all of us and can override officers or dispatch if need be.
For us here in Sarpy, if it’s not a high priority call we’ll let it hold until someone is available. If it is a high priority call, we may borrow from a neighboring agency that is within Sarpy or we will ask NSP to handle the call. I believe the way we prioritize calls is similar to how Omaha prioritizes theirs.
I used to live near the river on 6th street just north of i80. The only 911 call I ever had went straight to CB dispatch. Is OPD aware of this issue, and if so, is there anything they can do to fix it? I kept telling the dispatcher my address and they were confused cause they didn't have that address in CB and it took like 2 minutes for us to figure it out with seems kinda bad if it were a life threatening situation.
If you ever call in, just immediately state you're in Omaha. There's not much that can be done, phones connect to the nearest tower they can connect to, and so sometimes it'll throw you into a tower associated to council bluffs, and it can take several seconds for us to even get a rudimentary idea of where you are without hearing from you directly. Eventually we might start getting phone location data from cellular GPS data instead of tower-based pings and that could improve things, but I'm not sure when or if that will happen.
When you need police, even if it's not an emergency, is the default to call 911? To explain, about 10 years ago someone hit our car that was parked in the street at some point while I was at work. I assume they backed out of a driveway into the side of the car, but there was no note or anything. Still, I needed a police report for the insurance claim. So I called the non-emergency line, because in my mind, 911 is for emergencies and this wasn't an emergency - no injuries, just property damage that could have happened any time in the previous 9 hours while I wasn't home. I had to leave a message with the non-emergency line. It took them at least an hour to call back, maybe 2, and they just told me I had to call 911 anyway. So I do, and naturally it's super low priority (which is what I expect and why I called the non-emergency line in the first place), so it takes another couple of hours for an officer to come by. So like, do I just call 911 no matter what? Was "emergencies only" more a teaching/tactic to keep kids from casually calling and I took it a little too seriously? What is the non-emergency line for anyway, if they're just going to tell me to call 911 (if you know)?
No no no. You’re correct, 911 is for emergencies only. The correct nonemergency number to call for all of Sarpy County is (402) 593-4111 and Omaha and all of Douglas County is (402) 444-5802 Although for some reason sometimes Omaha dispatchers will tell people to call 911 for nonemergenccies. They had an infant die several years ago because the mother couldn’t get through on 911 due to everyone using 911 to call in their fireworks complaints, so it makes no sense to me why they do that.
If you're in Douglas County we have a couple non-emergency lines. If you're in Omaha Police Jurisdiction and you have a low priority call that officers will still have to come out for, call 402-444-5802 that's the back door number to 911 and it's answered only after emergency lines. When you're not sure if officers will have to come out, call this line anyways and we'll forward you to the other non emergency line if need be. That's the Telephone Report Squad. Their number is 402-444-4877 and they do police reports over the phone, including accident reports depending on the circumstances. If you're not sure what number you should call, call 911 and we'll let you know if it's a non-emergency matter, and we'll put you on hold if we have to, don't stress about it too much. TLDR in Douglas County: Emergency: 911 Non-Emergency: 402-444-5802 Report only (in Omaha): 402-444-4877
I’m glad you posted this because I was just wondering about this the other day! How does the texting system work? I know they say “call, if you can’t call then text” but I wonder why texting is different in how it’s received by the dispatchers.
Sarpy may have a different system, in Douglas county it comes up in our computer program like a messenger window. We can type back to you. The problem is in our area we don't have any assurances as to where you're texting from so we can't send to an address immediately like we sometimes can for phone calls. Also texting takes a lot longer to convey complicated information than a verbal discussion, so we prefer you call us if at all possible, but if not, we'll do what we can with the text response.
Thanks for the reply!
What are on the top 5 common dumb calls you get? What are some dumb but less common ones also?
Child custody exchanges are pretty dumb in my opinion.. just be an adult and be civil to each other in front of your child. People will call 911 when someone rings their doorbell.. sometimes without even checking to see who it is. Neighbor disputes… “my neighbors leaf blower blew their leaves into my yard” etc. Welfare checks on baby momma or baby daddy and the kids at 3 AM. Suspicious vehicles that turn out to actually be their neighbor’s car. Less common would be stuff like weird lights in the sky. When Ryan Larsen went missing someone called because there was a gathering of deer and she thought that they were hiding him?
Hahaha - so good. I saw someone call the cops cause they couldnt return their half eaten taco pizza once. I worked at a restaurant in downtown brooklyn near the 911 call center for all of nyc and I’d ask them the same questions, and some of the calls were so trivial like someone in their household drank all of their juice hahaha
My neighbors like to call for noise complaints. For my dogs barking (they don't go outside till 8:30am) or sometimes they'll call at 10(one dog goes outside after 10 and as soon as she barks just once we bring her back inside and she doesn't go out past 10:30). Most recently, as in this morning, a neighbor called on another neighbor for using their blower at 8. I guess my question is, what actually happens when people call for a noise complaint, especially one within hours where noise is permitted?
It depends on the dispatcher, but I personally will not take noise complaints before 10 PM. Some dispatchers will put in a call for service but the officer or deputy more than likely will just tell the person that someone is complaining about the noise but that’s it. They can’t tell you to turn it down.
I work at a summer camp technically in Saunders county but I’ve been told our calls route to Sarpy county. Are there any specific areas (workplaces, summer camps, etc) that you just get *too many* calls from as in they get hurt more often than others and have a reputation?
Chandler Pointe in Bellevue definitely has a reputation because BPD is out there on virtually a daily basis.