A DAO in the Life April 2021

By Stephen M. Willoughby, Director of Richmond Department of Emergency Communications

Public safety doesn’t “shut down.” Citizens need help every minute of every day, and Richmond’s public safety staff must be there to answer and respond to their calls for help, COVID-19 or not.

Throughout this yearlong pandemic, my focus and challenge has been on how we can help to keep everyone safe while continuing to provide essential public safety services. Everyone includes citizens, other first responders and our staff – the “first of the first responders” at the Richmond Department of Emergency Communications, who answer and dispatch 911 and non-emergency calls for the City of Richmond and provide and maintain public safety infrastructures for the city.

We are one of the busiest 911 emergency communications centers in Virginia and one of the busiest per capita in the United States. In 2020, our emergency communications officers answered 253,097 911 calls and dispatched 367,328 calls for service for police, fire/EMS and animal control.  

While some of our administration and technology staff have been able to work remotely through the pandemic, all of our approximately 75 emergency communications officers plus supervisors have been working their 12-hour shifts around-the-clock in the operations center.   

Our operations center, or “ops floor,” is one open room where staff work in close proximity to each other at large consoles that feature six or more computer monitors and other communications equipment.  We have instituted all safety precautions recommended by public health officials for these staff members who are not able to social distance easily. This has included providing face masks, cleaning supplies and weekly sanitizing procedures in the building, limiting visitors, modifying mail and package deliveries, and adjusting leave and staffing to reduce the number of staff in the building at one time. In addition, we have installed Plexiglas dividers between console stations and made use of our training center for spacing out staff.

We have worked closely with the City of Richmond’s Department of Fire and Emergency Services Office of Employee Health, which is designated as the singular point of contact for city employees, on possible and confirmed COVID-19 exposures and testing. We work with them to identify employees who have been in direct prolonged exposure to those who have tested positive. We help to answer staff questions, provide guidance, facilitate testing, coordinate benefits and file all necessary paperwork.

Designated as essential workers, all of our staff had the opportunity to receive COVID-19 vaccinations in early March 2021, and now we are providing two employees each week to help the regional vaccination center with data entry, registration, parking and wheelchair access.

Helping to keep the public and our partners safe during the pandemic has posed other challenges. Each time a citizen calls 911, our call-takers must first determine the location of the emergency and the type of help needed. This information is provided to our dispatchers to send help, while our call-takers continue to gather important information from callers to help the first responders prepare for arrival on scene. Depending on the type of emergency, callers are asked questions to help determine the type and number of responders and equipment needed as well as to identify and locate crime suspects. During the pandemic, our call-takers need to keep the callers on the line long enough to ask additional questions on COVID-19 symptoms, exposure and testing so that the first responders can take necessary precautions when interacting with these citizens.

We must coordinate and share this information with first responders to make sure they stay safe, while assuring citizens that providing this additional COVID-19 information is not delaying, preventing or changing the help that they receive.

Keeping everyone safe in 2020 also meant handling the added strains on staff and citizens that arose from the civil unrest over the summer. Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney created a task force assigned to “reimagine public safety” in light of concerns. I worked with other public servants and community members on this task force to develop recommendations on police use of force, taking a human service approach to calls for service, and community healing and engagement.

We are now beginning the process of turning these recommendations into policies, procedures and practices in our department and throughout the City of Richmond. In addition, we are putting into place technologies and policies that soon will allow our emergency communications officers to answer and dispatch 911 calls remotely, so that we will be prepared for future needs.

Both of these initiatives will change how our emergency communications officers, supervisors and other staff work every day. But as I have seen throughout 2020 and up to now, our staff is adept at handling change and challenges. And as we begin to see the light at the end of the pandemic tunnel, I am confident that we will continue to help make Richmond a safer city for each and every resident.