By Christine Otsuka
An intoxicated driver leads four police cars on a high-speed chase. A church is robbed and the police bring out the dogs. A suicidal woman escapes from a psychiatric ward and is roaming the streets of Ottawa.
That’s a slow night for 911 operator Eva Burnett.
The communications centre where Burnett works is the heart of the Ottawa police station. A 20-inch flat screen in front of Burnett monitors the position of all the police officers in town. With the click of a button she can see into virtually any backyard in Ottawa, she says. She wears a headset and suddenly a low tone rings in her ears.
She responds, “Ottawa Police, how can I help you?”
There are 20 people working at the call centre on what Burnett deems “a typical night for the cold, rainy weather.”
Stabbings have been reported, accidents have occurred, but nobody in the call centre flinches. It’s calm, quiet. Until the man to Burnett’s right mutters something to himself.
Burnett shouts out, “Hey Rene, you’re talking to yourself again!”
Everyone laughs. “You have to have a sense of humour to work here,” she says. “Right, Rene?” Fellow 911 operator Rene Theriault smiles as he shakes his head.
Throughout the course of the night, the operators crack jokes, send messages to each other and invite me to do the same.
They may be the city’s first point of contact when there’s an emergency, but they still know how to have a good time.
“These people are my family,” Burnett says.
These people keep Centretown safe.
Tonight Burnett is plugged in to central Ottawa. She tells me about the types of calls we’ll probably hear – bar fights, disturbances, accidents and break-ins.
She’s right.
“We unfortunately can tell a lot by an address,” she says. “Every area has its problem.”
Burnett says the centre receives a lot of calls from the Centretown community in the wintertime about homeless people sleeping just inside the front doors of apartment buildings to keep warm. Police are dispatched to remove them, because it’s considered trespassing.
Calls about homeless people are routine in this business, Burnett says. But so are calls from strange people.
Around midnight a man calls to report an Ottawa city van that was parked outside his house. He speaks slowly; precisely. Burnett immediately knows what type of call this will be. She looks at me and mouths two words: “he’s crazy.”
After 18 years as a 911 operator, Burnett has become skilled at reading people.
“You’re calling to report that an Ottawa city van was parked outside your house, but isn’t there
anymore?” she asks, then waits. There’s silence on the other end of the line.
“Sometimes you have to say it back to them to let them hear how crazy it sounds,” she says. She adds the caller is probably really intelligent, almost too smart for his own good. She suspects he was a professor at one time.
Burnett says weekend nights are the busiest. The call centre averages more than 1,000 calls a night. So far, at 2:20 a.m. four bar owners have called to report fights. Part of Burnett’s job is to recognize possible danger zones.
“Hell’s Angels are known to frequent this bar, so we’ll just keep an eye on this one,” she says.
As Burnett begins to tell me about reaction times, a woman who escaped from the psychiatric ward of an Ottawa hospital phones in. She sounds distraught, questioning everything Burnett asks her. Burnett nails down the woman’s location, and sends the closest available police officer to pick her up at a 7-Eleven.
Burnett keeps her talking by asking her a series of questions until an officer arrives.
“We try to keep people on the phone until after an officer is able to get there in a life or death situation,” she says.
Burnett continues to tell me about reaction times. “We’re very quick for priority one calls, when it’s a life or death situation,” she says. “We usually have someone there within 15 minutes.”
In this case, the police were on the scene within five minutes.
It’s 2:30 a.m., but you wouldn’t know it from the blindingly bright lights in the call centre. Light is one thing Burnett says Centretown needs more of.
In Centretown, Burnett says that prostitution, gang-related crime, armed robberies, assaults and break-ins generally happen after the sun goes down.
“There isn’t necessarily more crime at night, just different types of crimes,” she says.
Fortunately, Burnett won’t have to brave the dark streets when she’s done work.
She’s here until seven in the morning, making sure we can all sleep at night.