By Martin B. Cassidy
Staff Writer
February 7, 2005
GREENWICH - Whether police like it or not, uniformed officers will be replaced by a civilian-manned emergency dispatch system handling police, fire, and emergency calls, First Selectman Jim Lash said last week.
Lash noted that the Silver Shield Association, which represents the 152 uniformed officers, had granted the town the right to implement the system in their 2000 contract.
"This has been talked about for five years, so it's not sneaking up on anybody," Lash said.
Last week, as he hailed the change as a more efficient use of highly trained police officers, Lash defended the town's first attempt -- from 1977 to 1986 -- to use civilians to handle emergency calls.
"Let's start with a little history" he told finance officials last week. "One of the ways it was very successful was that people who came through it became important members of the police department."
Others recall the town's past civilian dispatch system as a failure. Several police officers said the civilian dispatchers were overworked, underpaid and poorly treated.
In 1986 the Board of Estimate and Taxation approved a plan proposed by then-Police Chief William Andersen to return dispatching duties to town police officers. Civilian dispatchers were eliminated by attrition and replaced with uniformed dispatchers.
"To say that this program has been a dismal failure is an understatement," Andersen wrote in his explanation to the budget committee.
Andersen cited the constant turnover of civilian dispatchers in his pitch, with the average stay of a dispatcher being a year and two months, leading to inexperienced operators answering potentially life-or-death calls.
"For what they were expected to do and how long they were expected to work they were not paid anything," Officer Peter Silbereisen, a police dispatcher, said. "You endd up with people leaving one day and not coming back."
The fiscal prudence of paying a lower salary to civilian dispatchers than the higher pay to police currently filling the posts was one of Lash's main selling points for returning to civilian dispatchers.
Lash said the new system would free up officers who now cover for absent police dispatchers. Walters said he would like to use those man hours to create neighborhood resource officers for community policing. An alternate plan calls for four street sergeants who would supervise patrolmen.
Sgt. James Bonney, president of the Silver Shield Association, said he foresees police being asked to fill in for absent civilians, and that the specifics of the plan are still unclear. The Greenwich Firefighters Local 1042 does not oppose the plan, Lt. John Novak, president of the union said.
Bonney and Lt. Mark Kordick, vice president of the union, said on Thursday they anticipate the cuts would mean less public safety, but acknowledged the union had given the town permission to make the change if they negotiated with the union about the contract.
But Kordick said mishandled calls by civilian dispatchers caused resentment between officers and the dispatchers in the 1980s. Of the 55 civilian dispatchers who worked for the program between 1977 and 1986, 25 quit, seven were fired, and 14 became police officers.
Walters said that the current system causes staffing headaches for supervisors.
Since the fiscal year began in July, the department's nine auxiliary dispatchers have been pulled off patrol to cover 133 dispatch shifts, requiring the town to pay overtime to fill the empty patrol slots.
Walters said he is awaiting a union counterproposal that would give a framework for negotiation.
Officer Clifford Yasek, a dispatcher for 18 years, said that while civilian dispatch brought many fine officers into the department, those officers quitting their dispatching jobs contributed to the turnover problem and the program's demise.
"Most of the dispatchers became police officers so it kind of didn't work then, because it was a stepping stone to being a policeman," Yasek said.
But Michael Dolhancryk, Norwalk's director for combined dispatch and emergency planning, said that his city will launch a civilian dispatch system on April 17 like that proposed by Greenwich. In Stamford, police and firefighters still staff the city's 911 system.
Dolhancryk said the change is driven by the same argument Lash is using. Paying a police officer to answer emergency calls when you can pay a dispatcher less is a waste of money and potential, he said.
"Basically you are paying police officers to be on the street to be protecting and serving citizens," Dolhancryk said. "You want to use people and their skills at a proper salary."
Dolhancryk has overseen the conversion from uniformed to civilian dispatch in Boone County, Ky., a suburb of Cincinnati, and in Claremont County, Ohio.
Dolhancryk said that computers allow dispatchers to access street maps and other geographical information on screen, and that has eliminated the need for dispatchers to have a encyclopedic recall of cross streets and neighborhoods.
Greenwich's police dispatchers can pull up road maps and locate addresses via computer.
"Twenty years ago you would want to make very very sure the dispatchers were longtime residents and knew the roads and could picture the town and city in their mind," Dolhancryk said. "But now dispatch systems do that for you."
Donald Morgan Saunders, a former civilian dispatcher, said that in 1986, he was drummed out of his job by negative reviews from police supervisors who favored dispatchers interested in a police career.
"I was a little stubborn and stayed on and continued to get negative reviews," Saunders said. "After six months they brought me to the police chief's office and I was fired."
During those six months the gulf between the police officers and the outsiders became apparent, Saunders said.
Saunders said with a mostly male police force, it was inevitable that the officers would make crude jokes and comments that offended dispatchers, some of them female.
"It was like a fraternity and with the majority of the males they would get carried away with their sexual remarks," Saunders said. "They should divorce the dispatchers from the police and keep them entirely separate from the blue society because you're always treated and looked at as an outsider."
Walters said he was aware of tensions within the earlier system, but felt the hiring of three civilian supervisors to oversee the dispatchers would help buffer the two groups. Those supervisors will report to a lieutenant in the department, he said.
Former Police Chief Thomas Keegan, who led the department from 1982 to 1986, said that since the 1980s civilian dispatch has become more successful, and that problems with the Greenwich system were overplayed.
Keegan said that for the good of public safety, policemen will accept a well-run civilian dispatch system.
"Policemen tend to prefer brother officers but it doesn't make a whole lot of good business sense to have a sworn officer with police powers to do a job a civilian could do," he said.
Bonney said this generation of police officers would not mistreat civilian dispatchers.
"We're all professionals and we won't blame them for an unwise decision the town made," Bonney said.
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