It was a December night on the Las Vegas Strip. Christmas was days away, holiday staffing was in effect, and the PSAP was moving at full speed. I was away from my radio trainee, working through a queue of calls, when a hotel security officer came on the line. Multiple fatalities outside. I remember the disbelief I felt as I routed that call, and then suddenly, everything accelerated.
That call was over a decade ago. I still think about it.
Not because it broke me. But because that’s what this job does to you—it lives in you. The weight of what telecommunicators carry doesn’t clock out at the end of a shift. It doesn’t disappear when the headset comes off. It becomes part of who you are.
This week is National Public Safety Telecommunicators Week. And I want to take a moment, not to celebrate in the abstract, but to speak directly to the people still sitting in those seats.
I grew up in 911. From the very first call I took, I knew I was called to this work. For 14 years, I wore the headset proudly at the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, in the community where my family and I still live. I worked the floor, I supervised, and I trained. I took calls I will carry for the rest of my life. Calls that reminded me, again and again, that the person on the other end of that line was depending on me to hold it together so they didn’t have to.
What nobody talked about enough (at least not when I was coming up) was how hard it is to hold it together. How isolating it can feel when the shift ends and the world outside has no idea what just happened in your center. How easy it is to start questioning whether you’re doing enough, whether you’re good enough, whether the weight you feel is weakness or simply what it means to care deeply about your work.
I wrote about Imposter Syndrome a few years back, and the response I got told me everything I needed to know: we don’t talk about this stuff nearly enough.
So let me say it plainly, to every dispatcher working a 12-hour overnight this week:
The weight you feel is not a sign that you don’t belong there. It’s proof of how much you do.
The calls that stay with you—the ones you replay, the ones that catch you off guard months later—those aren’t evidence of failure. They’re evidence of presence. Of a human being who showed up, fully, for someone else’s worst moment. That is not a small thing. That is everything.
I made one of the hardest decisions of my life when I left the center. Four years ago, I stepped away from a place I had called home for 14 years. I wasn’t sure I was making the right choice. I wasn’t sure who I was outside that role. And if I’m honest, it took me a long time to stop feeling like I had walked away from something sacred.
What I’ve learned since then is that the work doesn’t end when you leave the console. For me, it evolved.
Today, I get to advocate for the people still doing what I did. They’re the professionals who are the first voice in someone’s most desperate moment, the ones who coordinate the response before the responders even arrive. The ones who never get the full story, who rarely hear how it ended, who move on to the next call because there’s always a next call.
I carry that with me every single day. And it’s why weeks like this one matter.
But I also want to be honest about what NPSTW can sometimes feel like from inside the center: a catered lunch and a banner on the wall that disappears by Friday. I say that not to diminish the gestures, but to push us as an industry to go further.
Recognition that lasts looks like advocacy. It looks like funding. It looks like mental health resources that are actually accessible and actually used without stigma. It looks like leadership that checks in on its people not just during appreciation week, but on the random Tuesday when someone is quietly struggling. It looks like organizations (NENA, APCO, 911der Women, and others) doing the work year-round to ensure that telecommunicators are seen, supported, and heard at every level.
This profession saved me in ways I am still discovering. And I believe, with everything I have, that the people in it deserve far more than we currently give them.
So this week, if you are in that chair, if you are pulling a holiday shift or an overnight, if you are a new call-taker still finding your footing or a veteran supervisor who has seen more than anyone should. I want you to know something.
You are not just a dispatcher. You are the calm in someone else’s chaos. You are the voice that says, “I’m here!” when everything else has fallen apart. You are the first link in a chain that saves lives every single day.
And the call that stays with you? The one you still think about?
That’s not a burden. That’s the mark of someone who answered when it mattered most.
Thank you for answering the call. Every single time.
Andrea King ENP, is Director of Public Safety at Axon and a former 911 communications supervisor and trainer with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. She is a passionate advocate for diversity, inclusion, and mental health in the emergency communications profession.