While frontline police deal with danger and death, 111 staff work to keep emotions in check. Beck Vass spends a night at the call centre, and Elizabeth Binning goes on patrol
KEY POINTS:
She is responsible for sending cops to crimes and crashes in one of the busiest areas of New Zealand policing but for the past 10 years she's kept her career a secret. Rose (not her real name) is one of 170 Aucklanders who work shifts answering and responding to emergency phone calls at the police Northern Communication Centre in Grey Lynn.
It's a job so important she can't even take a toilet break without getting someone to take over. After a decade of helping to save lives, and even having to listen as lives were lost, she still doesn't tell people how she makes her living.
"I just say I'm a cleaner," the 35-year-old says, smiling. "Or a social worker sometimes, depending on the person. It's hard."
It's also a way of distancing herself from the high-stress scenarios she deals with. Rose is Manukau's police dispatcher, in charge of sending police in patrol cars to emergencies.
Dispatchers are the second link in the chain reaction to 111 calls. The first, communicators, answer the calls.
The dispatcher manages the patrol unit response to murders, crashes, reports of suspicious activity, and any other event police are called to. It's Thursday night - not the busiest for police but there is plenty to do.
Dispatching requires intense multi-tasking. Rose discusses her job in between sending police to a growing list of 25 emergencies, two of which are fatal.
Her team has about 30 staff, who fill the room grouped in fours. Each is perched beneath a sign marked with the geographic area they are in charge of. Half are answering 111 calls, the rest manage patrol cars, pressing a panel with their feet to communicate with officers on police radio, leaving their hands free for the fast typing needed to detail events.
Six staff wear police uniforms but most are non-sworn officers and most are women.
Sixty per cent of New Zealand's 700,000 emergency 111 calls were received in the centre last year. Across the room, staff from Fire Service communications are doing the same job.
The atmosphere is remarkably calm. It can't be any other way. On the right of two computer screens, Rose has a detailed street map tagged with the locations of her patrol units.
On the left, the list of 25 emergencies increases to 35 within minutes. Each line of typing records a different job needing attendance, some of them immediately. Two of the lines record deaths in separate industrial and motor vehicle accidents. Each needs several patrol cars.
Despite the upsetting, at times horrific, events before her, Rose talks passionately about the job she loves.
Rose explains she constantly thinks about what patrol car officers are doing, where they are and how long they might take. She also needs to know details of every incident and the order and speed in which they need to be attended. Above all, she needs to be calm to keep frontline officers composed while they're involved in the emotions of an emergency. "With this job, it's always balancing, a lot of prioritising when we're going to send units where," she explains.
She has become a little desensitised to events and some black humour creeps in to get her through. She says the hardest part of her job is listening to the emotion in the police officers' voices when they are at scenes.
"You're not at the scene, you're not seeing it, but you have to deal with the emotion of the cop."
The more stressful events she has handled include speaking to an officer who was shot at during a police chase, but was fortunately unharmed, and another chase where she was speaking with a police officer who watched, then had to deal with the consequences, as the offender crashed and died.
Losing composure - officers' or her own - could lose lives. "It is hard sometimes but, to keep their safety in mind, sometimes you've just got to tell them off and be stern and strict. You don't have to be nasty about it.
"The best thing we can do is be calm and collected. There's no use getting excited. You don't let it get to you and you don't buy into the emotion either. I think you become quite cynical, you cut out the emotion. It does make your heart take a beat but then you carry on. Life goes on, doesn't it?"
She speaks in police code and jargon and knows the officers over the radio by voice. She used her spare time to visit them to experience the frontline first hand.
"It gives me an appreciation of what they do, why it takes so long sometimes to do a lock up [arrest]. In some ways they become like your family and we take a lot of pride in trying to keep them as safe as possible. That is our primary job, ensuring their safety."
She recalls incidents collectively, using "we" or "our", instead of speaking in the first person. It's the same bond police rely on in frontline work - they watch each other's backs. Trust is critical in a job with such high stakes,
They work 10-hour shifts for six days straight with a four-day break at the end.
"Some days, you can go home and your mind's going round and round and you think: 'Did I remember to do this, did I remember to do that?' Sometimes all you want to do is go home and, if my son's around, I say: 'Do not talk to me for 30 minutes'. And I make myself a cup of tea and put some nice music on, have a cigarette and refuse to answer phones.
"You can never stop learning, there's alway something new to learn and that's what I love about it. You're forever learning."
Sometimes, the team talks people out of committing suicide. Other times they aren't so fortunate and they're forced to listen as a person takes their own life.
"You've just got to take it in your stride because you don't know what your day's going to bring. That's the one beauty of this job compared to your standard office job."
Rose is described by several of the team as one of the best in the business, although shift commander, Inspector Gavin MacDonald, is proud of all the staff. "You've got people on the phone screaming 'help me, help me'. You can still hear people getting beaten up," he explains. "In other jobs, if you make a mistake a house is either painted the wrong colour, or you've given somebody the wrong change. But in our job, if we make a mistake, we're highly scrutinised. We can't really have an off day and think: 'I'm going to slack off'. You've just got to be on the ball all the time."
They are there because they enjoy it. "The people I work with are all the same. They just want to do the best for their community. You see some of the stress on them some days and they've just got so much resilience," says Rose.
MacDonald says the bulk of emergency calls are alcohol-related, mostly disorder and violence. The team also provides advice to callers.
One woman has called to say she found out her boyfriend is cheating on her and wants to "scratch his eyes out". Another has had a burned-out car outside her home for a week. Another is a child concerned about her mother's ex-boyfriend. Yet another has a group of youths outside her home who are worrying her but are not making noise or doing anything illegal.
For these people, the scenarios are emergencies and communicators must treat all calls the same. The process is methodical and is recorded at every step. The system was reviewed after the disappearance of Auckland woman Iraena Asher at Piha in October 2004. Asher, 25, called 111, saying she had attended a party and was being pressured for sex.
A taxi was sent to her aid but it went to the wrong address. She was never seen again.
It's an extreme case of what can happen and a tragic highlight of the huge range of calls to which the team responds.
Several electronic display boards show the team their performance targets and results, which are now updated every 15 minutes.
The officer in charge of the centre, Superintendent Allan Boreham, says the target is to answer 90 per cent of calls within 10 seconds and all within one minute.
Performance is currently at 93 per cent, something he is pleased with, considering the centre caters to more than half (2.2 million) New Zealanders' emergency needs.
Between 4pm and midnight, the centre has received 1368 jobs, among them 62 car crashes, 55 domestic disputes, 65 disorder events, one rape, four suicide attempts and two deaths.
"I am proud of them," Boreham says of the team. "It is a tough job. And yet they're doing it better than they've ever done."
- Beck Vass
The police emergency call process
1. People call 111. A Telecom operator directs callers to fire, ambulance or police.
2. Callers are put through to the desired emergency service.
3. A "communicator" answers the call and seeks information, including what has happened, where and when.
4. Details are typed into a computer system which is seen live by "dispatchers".
5. Dispatchers in charge of the police patrol cars in different geographic areas speak to officers using police radio, sending them to jobs.
All in a night's work
It takes only a few seconds for the dispatcher to relay details of the serious crash. But for the police officers handling the incident, that quick call is the start of a job which will occupy the rest of their shift.
I am riding with Senior Sergeant Wayne Lambie, the Counties Manukau shift manager for the night, when we hear details about an accident in Dannemora.
All we know is that a pedestrian has been hit and the serious crash unit is on its way which indicates the pedestrian is badly injured.
We arrive with flashing lights and sirens, driving past a uniformed officer who is blocking the entrance of the suburban road to other cars and onlookers.
As we get out of our car the female pedestrian is already in the back of the ambulance, with St John officers working frantically to stabilise her.
Her blue shoes and orange tinted glasses lie on the driveway where she had been hit. There is no handbag, wallet or anything that can identify her. The driver of the car that hit her stands silently with two police officers. He has just finished explaining how he was reversing down his drive when he felt something wasn't right.
As the ambulance prepares to leave for the hospital Lambie puts his head in the front door hoping to get some information which may help police identify their "Jane Doe".
But the paramedics can only say the woman has blondish hair, which means hours of trying to find her next-of-kin.
Lambie arranges for another officer to go to hospital to see if doctors can give any further details about her estimated age, height, identifying features like tattoos, and whether she has any jewellery or a wedding band.
We then start questioning neighbours, asking if anyone knows of a woman who regularly went for a walk on her own. No one does.
As the evening goes on, details come back from the hospital. The woman is possibly in her 50s but it is difficult to tell because of her injuries.
She is estimated to be about 158cm tall with shortish strawberry-blonde hair. She had been drinking.
The description is relayed as we go from door to door. Some people answer their door with a panicked look that comes from seeing a policeman standing on their porch at that time of night.
Others want to help and nominate neighbours who might fit the woman's description.
It raises our hopes as we make our way in the cold and dark to the next home, but the neighbour is always safe and sound.
Many of the residents speak limited English and struggle to understand what has happened, but Lambie keeps trying - there must be someone related to the critically ill woman.
Several officers walk the streets asking the same questions but with no luck.
At 9pm Lambie liaises with the duty inspector at the Northern Communication Centre asking for a media release to be issued with the description of the woman in the hope someone may recognise her.
Other officers are trying to piece together what happened. It appears she might have been lying on the footpath when she was hit.
By 11pm, more than four hours after the accident happened, the release has not generated any clues and police have knocked on the doors of hundreds of homes. By now, the officers are forced to wait for the woman to be reported missing.
As Lambie's shift finishes for the night the next district shift manager, Senior Sergeant Cornell Kluessien takes over.
He has been briefed on the accident, so when he receives a phone call later saying "Jane Doe" has died, it is his job to go to the hospital.
With two other officers working on the case, Kluessien tries to see if there are any other identifying features on the woman's body missed while she was in surgery.
The viewing is carried out with as much dignity and respect as possible but there are no new clues. We leave still not knowing who the woman is.
From the hospital, we are called to a pursuit that has ended in a crash. We then head to an incident where a man is threatening his family with a knife, but before we get there a phone call comes from the Counties Manukau police station.
A man has rung to report his wife missing. She matches the woman's description and he is asked to come into the station with a photograph.
One glimpse is enough to know this is the right woman. It is now the early hours and Kluessien must tell the man his wife did not survive her injuries. It is not an easy task.
It is eight hours since the call came in about the woman being hit and we started trying to identify her. In that time the communications centre staff member who dispatched us on the job has dealt with hundreds of other calls.
- Elizabeth Binning
