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When a call is placed to 911, the sender expects a voice possessing a take charge sense of order, no matter the situation.

“It could be the craziest call that any police service, fire or ambulance has got ever. You don’t know what it’s going to be,” Halton Regional Police Services Communications Manager Brian Dodd told the Toronto Sun on Friday. “Based on your training, you must be available to manage that call from the beginning. When that call comes in you must process it as efficiently as possible so we can send help to the people that need it.”

The Halton Regional Police Service is the first law enforcement department in Canada to use an artificial intelligence system termed GovWorx to find and train potential 911 communicators in a timely fashion.

The right stuff

Dodd’s list of essentials didn’t end there.

“You also have to be accurate and quick with your data entry and your typing,” he said. “You must be able to manage conflict, manage stressful situations and the emotional roller coaster of handling emergencies all day.”

Try finding those qualities in one person, never mind in a stressful situation where life and death margins can be razor sharp. It is crucial a 911 employee is the sturdy link in the chain between caller and responder.

“They have to be able to manage all of these things, at the same time, knowing they have to get specific pieces of information, a specific time frame and put them in a call in a specific way so when an officer is responding they go into the situation knowing what’s going on,” Dodd said.

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Emergency communicators don’t script responses like telemarketers when trying to sell trinkets and baubles. Every call within the 911 spectrum is unique.

“Everyone has guidelines, but we don’t use a script because we find that every call is so different that we want the communicators to have enough freedom to manage the call, so they know which questions to ask,” Dodd said.

ganderson@postmedia.com