Bearing Witness

Sometimes at work I will have an observer sit with me for an hour or two so they can learn how 911 works. I take calls, explain how they get dispatched, how our computer programs work, and answer whatever questions they have. They all have different reasons, but the one I remember most was a woman considering applying for the job.

I got a lot of normal calls with her—cold reports, reckless drivers, hang ups, the usual. Then we got a call from someone witnessing an assault. Those calls aren’t out of the ordinary, but every so often they become something bigger. In this case, our caller watched a woman be strangled to death on the hood of her car. She updated us the entire time, from the moment the suspect put his hands around her neck to the moment she fell unconscious and stopped breathing. When the call ended, the observer looked at me and said, “I’ve heard enough.”

Then she stood up and walked out of the room.

I never saw her again.

It’s moments like those that put this job into perspective. Or when I tell someone what I do and they fall silent because they don’t know what to say. On the other hand, there are the people who ask, “What’s the worst call you’ve ever taken?” They don’t realize it’s actually a tie. I never know whether to choose the call where I listened to someone being sexually assaulted with a broken glass bottle or the one where a fourteen-year-old girl found her mother hanging in the garage. They don’t know I took both of those calls in the same shift.

Once, at a party, I made a joke about a bad call. Someone asked what happened, and I asked if he was sure he wanted to know. He said yes. I checked with the rest of the group too. They all agreed.

So I told them about the little girl who found her brother stabbed to death.

The group went quiet. The person sitting next to me started tearing up and tried to hide it.

I was still new then. That was when I learned it’s better to keep those stories to myself.

It gets easier over time, but sometimes I wonder if I’ve lost part of my humanity. How many times can you listen to someone get shot before it stops feeling shocking? For me, I think it was three.

Sometimes I forget calls I feel like I should remember. Most of the calls I’ve been subpoenaed for are ones I barely recall. I once sat in a courtroom while a recording from one of my domestic violence calls played. It was an open line that lasted nearly twenty minutes, the victim screaming and crying the entire time. People in the courtroom looked uncomfortable listening to it.

They didn’t know that when I originally took the call, I used the opportunity to eat lunch at my desk because it was the first quiet moment I’d had all shift.

I think about the woman who got up and left after that strangulation call. I don’t blame her.

Somewhere between my first day and now, I learned how to listen to things most people never forget. I still haven’t decided whether that’s resilience, burnout, or or something in between. Maybe it’s just survival.