How should emergency operators be classified?

In a letter to the Standard Occupational Classification Policy Committee (SOCPC) of the United States’ Bureau of Labor Statistics, the head of the FCC’s Public Safety & Homeland Security Bureau has argued the case for special classification for the country’s 911 operators.

In his letter, David Grey Simpson, Rear Admiral, USN (Ret), points out that “nearly 100,000 men and women working as 911 call-takers and dispatchers are classified under the ‘Police, Fire, and Ambulance Dispatcher’” category, which is grouped within ‘Office and Administrative Support Occupations,’ a category that also includes “commercial and other non-public safety call-takers and dispatchers, as well as many other categories of administrative workers”.

In 2014 the SOCPC received feedback advocating that employees working in this field receive a new occupational classification as ‘public safety telecommunicators’, ‘emergency service telecommunications specialists’ or ‘911 communications operators’, and that this classification be moved to the group that covers ‘Protective Services Occupations’.

The SOCPC has “initially declined to accept these recommended changes”, stating that in its view the work performed by public safety telecommunicators “is that of a dispatcher, not a first responder” and that separating public safety telecommunicators from other dispatcher categories “would be confusing”.

The SOCPC also recommended against reclassification on the grounds that most public safety dispatchers “are precluded from administering actual care, ‘talking’ someone through procedures or providing advice” and that they are “often located in a separate area from first responders and have a different supervisory chain”.

Simpson demurs. “Based on our experience working with the 911 community, the SOCPC’s initial findings appear to reflect an incomplete and inaccurate understanding of the work performed by today’s public safety telecommunicators,” he writes.

“As you enter the next phase of the decision-making process, we urge you to carefully consider the comments that have been submitted in response to the SOCPC’s initial findings by public safety organisations and individual telecommunicators.

“Among other things, these comments document that in the current 911 system, public safety telecommunicators: (1) under established protocols and procedures, provide assistance, guidance, and life-saving advice to 911 callers in many emergency situations; (2) are involved in the planning, coordination, and direction of response activities both before and after emergency personnel are dispatched to the scene; (3) receive specialised and rigorous training in emergency response and crisis management skills; and (4) operate within organisations and under chain-of-command structures that group them with other public safety professionals, including police, fire, and emergency medical personnel.”

Simpson goes on to say, “Today, many PSAPs [public safety access points] are also taking on a new role in which they not only receive 911 calls and dispatch first responders, but also analyse external information sources, such as photos; video from police body cameras, traffic cameras, or other publicly accessible cameras; machine-to-machine sensor inputs, such as Shot-Spotter; and alarms indicating traffic flow.

“Synthesising this information as a team, telecommunicators in the PSAP disseminate alerts or ‘reverse 911’ calls to the public as part of the emergency response. They coordinate activities with other agencies and, at times, are brought directly into the response when an on-scene participant engages the telecommunicator for mediation or other dc-escalating effort.

“These trends provide clear indication of the expanded scope of responsibility for public safety telecommunicators that exists in the NG911 environment.”

You can read the full letter here.

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