911 Crew Bulks Back Up

by PAUL BASS

National Public Safety Telecommunicators Week came and passed and Joy Dunston and Justin Augustine and their colleagues continued answering the call day and night to keep New Haveners safe and alive, with more help than they had a year earlier.

Duston has worked for the past 12 years as a police and fire dispatcher at the city’s 911 call center, officially called the Public Service Answering Point (PSAP). Augustine, a fellow city native, has seven years on the job, where he currently works as a supervisor, helping everyone stay calm amid daily life-and-and death pressures. The two took some time out as Public Safety Telecommunicators Week ended to join their boss, PSAP chief Joe Vitale, to discuss how they keep their composure to get quick, essential information from people reporting shootings or assaults or in-progress burglaries in order to funnel it instantly to first responders. They spoke of the importance of patience, on their end and the concerned callers’ end, in order to get those basic questions answered in order for the right help to arrive at the right place.

They also urged people to remember to dial the main police number 203 – 9466316 rather than 911 for parking complaints or any other matter that fails to fall under the definition of “dire emergency.”

The center, based on the top floor of 1 Union Ave., is now handling 131,000 emergency calls a year; just two years ago officials put the annual number of calls at 100,000.

Amid the growing demand, PSAP has made strides in the past year since Vitale, a retired Yale police captain (who did a stint running that department’s emergency communications operation), took the helm. Thanks to the pandemic and a general labor shortage, PSAP was down

14 dispatchers out of the 55 budgeted positions. That meant that dispatchers like Dunston were regularly working two or three 16-hour shifts a week at a highpressure, high-stakes job.

Since then most of the slots have been filled, with the last bunch of needed hires currently undergoing training, Vitale reported. Dunston is back to working 40hour weeks at a job that she continues to see as a way to strengthen and give back to her community.