This is National Dispatchers Week, when recognition is given to those who take the calls and dispatch the cars, fire trucks and ambulances.
SOMERSET — A police radio is a living thing. Listen long enough, and you’ll hear everything; birth and death. Fights and thefts and overdoses.
The voices on the police scanner belong to police officers and dispatchers at police and fire departments. The dispatcher takes the call, finds a car, and sends the car to the scene. The dispatcher will, if needed, send extra cars, and sometimes stays on the line with a victim, or with the frightened father of a sick child.
This is National Dispatchers Week, when recognition is given to those who take the calls and dispatch the cars, fire trucks and ambulances.
In Somerset, one of those people is Dispatcher William Aubin, a Fall River resident who has been manning the dispatch room for 24 years. He works day shift now, Monday through Friday, one of the privileges of being senior on the staff, but he’s worked every shift in his time, including Christmas day.
He started with the Somerset Police Department in 1994.
“I worked construction,” Aubin said. “In the winter, it would slow down.
“A friend of mine told me Somerset was hiring,” Aubin said. “I took this as a part time job. I did not expect this.”
Eventually, he became a full time dispatcher. For years, he also worked as a reserve police officer.
Aubin and his co-workers also do medical dispatching, and he said he’s seen overdose calls become a noticeable part of the job.
“Even in this small town, it’s more and more,” he said.
When you call the police, the first voice you hear is Aubin’s or one of his co-workers. Until the police or the ambulance arrives, the dispatcher is everything.
“I’ve given people instructions on how to give CPR during a call,” Aubin said.
Dispatchers like Aubin must renew their certification every year. He’s taken classes in how to get the most truth out of callers who are hysterical or otherwise impaired.
“When they yell, you just speak more softly,” he said, explaining how to encourage calm in a caller.
“We don’t get the respect we should,” he said of himself and his fellow dispatchers.
Of the business itself, Aubin said one of the hardest parts of his job is not knowing how each caller’s story ends.
He tells the story of getting a call from an older man who’d been sitting in his garage on a warm summer night, garage door up, enjoying the breeze.
“I stayed on the line with him, and he asked me to make sure the paramedics closed his garage door after him,” Aubin said.
It wasn’t too many days later that Aubin ran into one of the paramedics who responded to the call.
“He didn’t make it,” Aubin said of the man to whom he had spoken. “That bothered me.”
It isn’t always a sad job, though, Aubin said. He enjoys the chance to help people and he likes the work itself.
“It’s different every day,” Aubin said of the job. “Every call is different.”