Calif. Dispatcher Recalls Changes as She Retires

April 6, 2014
Lisa Hoffmann reflects on the new technology and other changes she witnessed during her 32-year career.

April 06--On March 21, her 55th birthday, Lisa Hoffmann sat down before five computer screens, logged in and put on her headset. Instantly there was a call.

"Nine-eleven, police and fire -- what is the exact location of your emergency?" she said. The call was for an abandoned car, nothing to remember. But Hoffmann will probably remember it anyway, because this was the first call on her last day in dispatch after 32 years.

Like many people who work high-stress public service jobs, Hoffmann, head of 911 dispatchers in San Francisco, was retiring on the day she became eligible for the maximum benefits.

Her last day with the City and County of San Francisco Department of Emergency Management was on a Friday. On her first Monday as a retiree, she celebrated by flying to Washington, D.C., to lobby for the inclusion of texting, cell phone photos and video as forms of reporting an emergency to 911.

"The dispatch telephones are computerized, but the backbone architecture is still an analog system that cannot process digital media," Hoffmann said. The lobbying trip was part of "9-1-1 Goes to Washington," sponsored by the National Emergency Number Association.

Hoffmann is the western regional director of the association, representing every state from Colorado to Hawaii, and north to Alaska. It is a volunteer job that Hoffmann has been doing for 13 years, and she is running for another two-year term in June. So, she'll still be working. She just won't be getting paid for it.

"It's hard to extract yourself from something you've done for more than half your life," said Hoffmann, who lives in El Sobrante with her husband, Erik Hoffmann,who runs a hardware store in Oakland. "I don't think I'll ever be out of the 911 industry."

She never thought she'd be in the 911 industry, either. When she started her career, 911 did not even exist in Contra Costa County, where she grew up, graduated from Antioch High (as Linda Murray) and still lives. She was a single mom and college dropout who needed a job with security and benefits. She applied to be a sheriff's deputy in Contra Costa County, but the clerk read the application wrong, thinking she was applying to be a dispatcher.

So she took the dispatch test, and the next thing she knew she was handed a headset in the Martinez dispatch center. She can still remember the day, April 12, 1982.

Baptism by fire

She can also remember her first call, because she was not trained in how to take it. Training happened with the caller on the line. She was told to pick up the phone and then yell out the problem, and someone would yell back what to do.

So she did, covering the mouthpiece and yelling that a caller said she was being beaten by her boyfriend or husband.

"Without even looking up, this lady takes a long drag off her cigarette, blows smoke right in my face and yells, 'Does he have any weapons?' " No. " 'Is he drunk or on drugs?' "

Hoffmann passed that test and was rewarded with 60 to 80 hours of overtime a month and a constant back and forth among night shifts, day shifts and swing shifts.

After five years, she was promoted to supervisor of dispatch and finally got a steady shift: graveyard.

"Working in a dispatch center is kind of like working in an automobile factory," she said. "You don't get to see the car driving down the street with the happy people in it. You just have to make sure that the wheel that you put on, all the bolts are in the right places so it doesn't come off and kill somebody."

Recruitment in 2007

She moved up the chain of command and was running the entire communications department for the Contra Costa County Sheriff's Office when she was recruited to San Francisco in 2007 as deputy director, Division of Emergency Communications.

The job entails overseeing all incoming emergency and nonemergency calls for San Francisco police, fire and medical. Every day 3,000 calls are handled, on average, for a total of 1.1 million a year. Eighty percent of the calls are for police, 16 percent are medical and 4 percent are fire.

Whether a person dials 911 or 553-0123, the non-emergency line, they all come in to the Department of Emergency Management, a two-story building that opened in 2000 on a rough block of Turk Street in the Western Addition.

Hoffmann found out just how rough it was on her first day on the job. She stepped to her second-floor window to enjoy the view and saw two women fighting in the street. One yanked off the other's wig and threw it in the street, where a taxi ran over it.

"Oh my God, the fight was on," Hoffmann said. "These two women were just duking it out."

She wanted to report the incident to the supervisor's desk, so she turned to one of her colleagues and introduced herself, then asked for the number, and was reminded, "Uhh, it's 911."

Right. She knew that. Her husband is a retired Moraga cop, and her son, Nick Ward, is a police officer in Antioch. And she was the first person to run San Francisco's 911 call center who had actually worked as a dispatcher, not in management at the police or fire department.

When she arrived in the city in 2007, dispatchers used a manual that had been handed down from the SFPD. So she wrote a manual specific to dispatchers, setting guidelines and discipline.

"It led to consistency and accountability," said William Lee, acting executive director of the Department of Emergency Management.

Hoffmann also helped overhaul the recruiting process by devising a computerized entrance exam that simulates the multi-functions of a dispatcher, similar to a driving test.

"Lisa was a recognized industry expert, so she provided stability in the department," Lee said.

Hoffmann managed 159 dispatchers, and a few years ago pulled a full shift when the center was caught short in a five-alarm fire. Up to her final day, she liked to sneak in and sit down among them to take calls. Sometimes it would be an hour before the operator next to her noticed the boss, with a "what are you doing here?"

"I'm answering the phone," she would say -- "helping out."

One time, years ago, Hoffmann took over for a dispatcher who had just taken a traumatic call and needed a break. The next call was worse than the one before -- a woman who had been raped, strangled and left for dead.

Moments of terror

"She just kept saying, 'He's going to come back. He's going to get me,' " Hoffmann said. "All I could do was keep her on the phone until we could get an officer there."

This call got Hoffmann to thinking that if the caller had been on a wireless phone, dispatch would not have been able to locate her.

"I just always thought about that when we migrated to wireless technology," she said. "We don't know where you are calling from, and my mission is to make sure we know."

She's been working on wireless accuracy for three years, the last two directly with the FCC.

She's also been thinking, during the last five years, that there was no specific code for tracking domestic violence calls. "So I created it," she said -- "made it up."

Now when a domestic violence call comes in, the dispatcher can code it so that a responding police officer knows what he is walking into. These upgrades were not possible when Hoffmann started out 32 years ago. Back then, it was a telephone system where every call was taken by punching a line into a switchboard and every incident written down by hand. Now calls are delivered directly to a dispatcher's headset, and the dispatcher types into a computer, which sends the information to the radio dispatcher, where it is sent by computer to patrol cars or fire engines.

Dispatchers used to take a location and send an ambulance or police or fire, and that was the end of it. Now they stay on the phone with callers and give them medical instructions or instruction on exiting a fire.

"We deliver a lot of babies and give a lot of CPR instructions over the phone," Hoffmann said.

Tough hours, high stress

The technology and the nature of a dispatcher's job have changed drastically over the last 32 years, but the hours and the stress are the same. Just this week, members of the dispatchers union held a rally at their headquarters to protest what they describe as chronic understaffing that has led to delays in answering calls. (Management claims that it meets the standards set forth by the National Emergency Number Association.)

"Lisa has managed to move through these transitions, and all the while she has provided citizens with the best 911 service that could be provided," said Brian Fontes, CEO of the emergency association, based in Alexandria, Va. "She is a go-getter."

The day after returning from Washington, Hoffmann went back to her old office and worked a full day, doing background work for new hires. That was on a Friday. Then, the next week, she finally had her first Monday of retirement -- spent at home, writing a lesson plan for 911 training in New Mexico. On Tuesday she was at the airport for a meeting of the California chapter of the emergency association.

On Wednesday, she was to emcee a City Hall ceremony to honor kids who called 911 when their parents were having medical emergencies.

"I might have a day off eventually," she said, during a meeting break. "But there's a lot of stuff that still goes on even if you're not there, and I promised I wouldn't leave them hanging."

-- Last Day in Dispatch: To watch a short video, go to: www.sfgate.com/news/item/lisa-hoffman-911-dispatcher-28339.php.

Sam Whiting is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: [email protected] Twitter: @samwhiting

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