April 12, 2022
National Public Safety Telecommunicators Week
April 10-16, 2022
 by Laura L. Sullivan, Public Relations Specialist
At 911, they’ve heard it all. Drunk calls. Toddlers calling 911 when they play with a phone. During the height of the pandemic dozens of citizens dialed 911 every day to report people for not wearing a mask or social distancing. A man called for someone to come out with a metal detector to recover the gold necklace he lost at the beach. One person called saying they were running late for a flight and demanded that 911 hold the plane. When told that this didn’t rise to the level of an emergency, the caller said it was an emergency to them.

Then, in the middle of non-emergency calls and accidental dials, comes the kind of life-and-death situation 911 was designed for. A woman says her husband is in cardiac arrest. Public Safety Telecommunicator Jessica Howard talks the panicked wife through detailed CPR instructions. By the time the fire department arrives they are able to get a successful heart rhythm. Today, the man has made a full recovery.

That is one of the many success stories that will be celebrated during National Public Safety Telecommunicators Week, April 10-16, 2022. Begun in 1981, this event recognizes the phone operators and dispatchers who have saved countless lives around the country.

“Our Telecommunicators are great multitaskers, compassionate, caring… they’re amazing, the unsung heroes of public safety,” says Lori Collins, 911 Database Analyst and Public Educator for Pinellas County.

The 911 telecommunicators work 12-hour shifts, four days on, three days off, with a lot of overtime. The phones have to be staffed all the time. During Hurricane Irma staff slept in the building. COVID swept through the call center three times. They created ten take-home kits with two radios and a laptop so radio operators could work at home if they were COVID-positive but asymptomatic.

A High Stress Job
The stress level of the job can be incredibly high. Cardiac event calls like the one Howard took are among the most traumatic for telecommunicators, as are childbirth, choking, and suicide. 911 telecommunicators are trained to give detailed medical or safety instructions for every possible scenario.

When Hurricane Irma was at its most intense, there was a 12-hour period when they continued to take calls but could not dispatch anyone to respond to them. Conditions were just too dangerous to allow emergency vehicles on the road. A telecommunicator took a call from a woman whose house was on fire. She talked her through evacuating her children… and then had to tell her that no one could come out in hurricane-force winds to save her house. When she hung up the phone she collapsed in tears, overcome with a sense of helplessness and grief for the woman who had just lost everything.

By the Numbers
The numbers tell a story of the amount of work telecommunicators have to do. According to Collins, in 2021 they handled a total of 1,178,000 calls (including 911 and inbound and outbound non-emergency calls.) Of those, 577,482 were 911 calls. There were 12,022 pandemic-related calls, 5,400 overdoses, 1,027 suicides, 26,000 falls, 493 water rescues, and 380 animal bites.

Collins says that for every car crash that occurs, 911 receives an average of 25 calls. They have to figure out which are the duplicate calls and quickly clear the line for other emergencies.

Repeat callers can clog up the 911 system. Very often, though, there are solvable problems underlying repeat calls. One person called 911 a total of 192 times requesting the fire department to come out and lift them up the two front steps to their house. If every response takes about 20 minutes, that’s 64 hours of the fire department’s time that keeps them from responding to emergencies.

Digging Deeper
The Complex Case Management Team was made for issues like this. Made up of 911, Fire Department, Emergency Management Services, Sunstar, Operation PAR, and Pinellas Integrated Care, they meet to discuss repeat callers and complicated cases. “There are solutions out there,” Collins said. “We just have to get together as a group and figure out what needs to be done.” In this case, they found a donor who got the person a removable ramp so they could take it if they moved to a new apartment. They secured a promise for funding on a Wednesday, the check was written Thursday, and on Friday the citizen had a new ramp.

They never needed to call 911 for a lift assist again.

Public Safety Telecommunicators listen carefully to the stories behind the stories. When an elderly man called 911 three days in a row to ask where his dinner was, a telecommunicator realized that they had responded to hospitalize his wife three days ago. When they sent a deputy out to conduct a welfare check, it was discovered that the man had Alzheimer’s, which no one had detected in the original callout. Thanks to a telecommunicator’s diligence, they were able to successfully connect the man to services that could help him. 

The communications center at the Pinellas County Public Safety Complex houses 911, Sunstar, and the sheriff’s office dispatchers. 911 also takes all of the sheriff’s office non-emergency calls. When you have to be in an office for 12-hour stretches, you need a comfortable work environment. The telecommunicators have 5-screen displays, chairs that are completely customizable, personal climate control, and tables that can smoothly rise at the touch of a button to convert to a standing desk.

Dispatching to Deputies
Sheila Sommer is a Communication Shift Supervisor with the PCSO. According to Sommer, certain qualities are vital in a public safety telecommunicator. “They need to be calm and strong, with plenty of empathy,” she says. “They must have the ability to make good level-headed decisions quickly, be able to problem solve very quickly, and have great attention to detail.” On the job they must be able to “deal with a horrible incident on the phone or on the radio and hold it together emotionally while it’s occurring. We cry later.”

Dispatchers do a lot to keep deputies safe on the job. “While working a radio channel, I was the dispatcher where a deputy ultimately ended up having to shoot someone who was shooting at people,” Sommer said. “I really just did my job, which was to send the back-up and resources needed to help to keep the deputy safe and calm after the incident. I received an award for my part in this incident.”

In another incident, Sommer took the 911 call when road rage led to a shooting. “This was an awful call and I can still hear them pleading for help.”

But Sommer loves her job. The best parts? “The adrenaline rush: high priority incidents, busy radio channels, and hearing the K9 excited on the radio.”

One of the most challenging parts can be the lack of closure. When you jump into a person’s life at one of their most traumatic moments it can be hard not to know how the story plays out in days and weeks to come.

Sommer knows that the public and even other divisions in the PCSO don’t always realize the extent of a public safety telecommunicator's responsibilities. National Public Safety Telecommunicator Week is a way to bring awareness to everything they do.

Somehow, these masters of multitasking manage to get it all done. Which is lucky for us, because their job can very often be a matter of life or death for deputies and for the citizens of Pinellas County.

“Celebrating National Public Safety Telecommunicators Week is important because it brings a spotlight to our often unsung heroes who wear the headset behind the scenes,” says 911 Supervisor Andrea Henry. “They act as the vital first link in emergency dispatch systems that ensures that the right assistance is sent to the right location and when seconds count in many life and death situations. They must make critical decisions each and every shift, several times a shift. Public Safety Telecommunicators deserve to be recognized for their expert skills in keeping the calm in the chaos!” 
PCSO Celebrates 50 Years of Flight
 by Laura L. Sullivan, Public Relations Specialist
When the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office (PCSO) decided to get a helicopter in April 1972, some citizens thought it was going to be an invasion of privacy. Would the sheriff be watching them sunbathe in their backyards?

Today, seeing a helicopter in the sky is a common sight. Military, news, hospital, and tourist helicopters are always zipping through our skies. But in 1972, helicopters were still a relatively new concept. Though the first practical helicopter, designed by Kiev-born Igor Sikorsky, took its maiden flight in 1939, helicopters weren’t widely used until the Korean and Vietnam wars. They weren’t common in urban settings.

Sheriff Don Genung (1958-1975) was all in favor of adding aircraft to the tools his deputies had available. In WWII he had been a combat glider pilot. As sheriff, he checked out the technology other agencies around the country were using, and thought that a Flight Unit would be a perfect addition to the PCSO. They’d been having a problem with people stealing cars, stripping them, and dumping them in the woods. The PCSO already rented an airplane once a week to scour the county for those. Sheriff Genung thought that a helicopter would be more versatile for sheriff’s office functions than a fixed-wing craft.

Meet the Bell
The $84,000 Bell 47 helicopter was way out of the agency’s budget. Luckily, the sheriff discovered that it could be leased for only a dollar a year as military surplus. And so, the PCSO Flight Unit was born.

The Bell 47 had a big bubble-shaped windscreen that gave the pilot a 180-degree view. The windscreen was made of Lexan, a polycarbonate resin thermoplastic that is used in everything from DVDs to drinking bottles to bulletproof glass. There was room for a pilot and a spotter.

Lieutenant George McNally was the agency’s first helicopter pilot. Deputy Bob Teasley came on soon after that. He flew helicopters in Vietnam, mostly a Huey but also the Bell 47 that PCSO was using. The fact that he made it through the war was a pretty good indication of his skills as a pilot, he thinks.

He got the job through a little bit of serendipity. When the PCSO got its helicopter, Teasley’s wife’s parents heard from their neighbor, a county commissioner, that the PCSO was looking for pilots. “Tell Sheriff Genung that Bob would be a perfect fit!” his wife Joy told the commissioner. She doesn’t know if this helped his chances, but in the end Teasley was the only non-deputy pilot hired. He went through the academy to get certified as a deputy. Though he would get into a patrol car on the occasional stormy night, Teasley spent the vast majority of his career in the helicopter.

Teasley was a pilot with the PCSO from 1972 to 1984. Back then, it wasn’t called Eagle but rather Air 1. Along with a reserve deputy who served as a spotter, Teasley followed burglars, murderers, and other fleeing suspects from the air. For the first ten years of his career, Teasley flew the helicopter, working the night shift the whole time.

By 1978, the PCSO had three helicopters. They were used for everything from tracking fleeing criminals to patrolling over shopping centers and industrial parks at night watching for burglars. In a 1978 interview in the Seminole Beacon, Lieutenant McNally said, “Criminals are funny people. They’ll try to get around burglar alarms by chopping a hole in the roof.” Lieutenant McNally spotted his share of rooftop perpetrators. Pilots found everything from kids playing hooky to a man in the woods burying a woman in a shallow grave. They even helped out the Environmental Protection Agency by conducting an aerial survey of all eagle nests in Pinellas County.

Expanding the Fleet
Helicopters weren’t the only component of the Flight Unit over the past fifty years. Eventually, the agency got a de Havilland Beaver fixed wing plane, also military surplus. It was mainly used to transport prisoners. (Today that aircraft has been converted to a seaplane and last we heard is working in Alaska.) Later the PCSO got an Aero Commander, seized from a major narcotics arrest. The plane, which had spent the first part of its life delivering Quaaludes to a dealer in Largo, became an active part of the PCSO Flight Unit.

For the last couple of years of his career with the PCSO, Teasley switched to fixed wing aircraft, shuttling prisoners or taking the sheriff up to Tallahassee. After he left the sheriff’s office, he flew freight planes for a while, then achieved his ultimate goal of flying for American Airlines.

The next helicopter the agency got after the Bell was an A-Star. The A-Star is known for its good performance at higher altitudes. It is also a relatively quiet helicopter, ideal for use in cities. Its quick start-up time makes it perfect for use as an emergency response helicopter.

Now, fifty years later, the PCSO is replacing a 31 year old helicopter. The new Airbus H125 helicopter arriving in May has more horsepower, more safety equipment, digital avionics, and an autopilot.

A lot of things have changed since Deputy Teasley’s time as a pilot here. Instead of a lone spotlight they called the “night sun,” helicopter pilots today have a wide range of technology to help them out, including infrared cameras that can spot a mouse at 1,000 feet.

One thing hasn’t changed since Deputy Teasley’s day, though. Just recently, his wife found the fire retardant jumpsuit he used to wear in the helicopter. Teasley still fits into it perfectly. “He hasn’t changed much since then,” Joy says. “Just a few more gray hairs.”

Becoming Top Dog: Taking Their Knowledge to the Streets
by Verliz Williams, Public Relations Specialist
With the guidance of lead instructor Deputy Tony LoRusso and the support of their classmates, all five handlers became certified K-9 officers under the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) standards.

The K-9 teams spent an entire week certifying in a range of apprehension, search, and obedience exercises, some of which were performed simultaneously with gunfire. “There were definitely some ups and downs during certification week,” said Deputy Zanandrie. “One particular exercise I was a little hesitant on was recall from a straight apprehension. The days leading up to certifying on that particular exercise I felt antsy, but by certification day I was confident.”

The FDLE only requires K-9 school to be 12 weeks, but the K-9 school hosted by the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office K-9 Unit is 16 weeks. “We spend a great deal of our time in school layering tracking, which is particularly difficult in urban environments,” said Deputy LoRusso. “We also pride ourselves on scenario based training, which we reserve for our last month of training since preparation of the handler to make high risk decisions can be lost when training the dogs is so extensive.”

For this particular group of handlers, their dynamic and bond was the epitome of supportive. “There are many defeats in K-9 school and each handler in this class was new, so there were many mistakes that happened often,” said Deputy LoRusso. “But, as a class and as individuals, they were committed to lifting each other up, maintaining positive camaraderie, taking ownership of their mistakes, and working hard. It was because of that attitude that they excelled.”

Becoming a K-9 handler is what some would consider a “dream job,” but getting there is no easy feat. “For those considering a future as a K-9 handler, my biggest piece of advice is to check your ego at the door,” said Deputy Zanandrie. Deputy Hunter added, “Don’t underestimate how difficult K-9 school is, and the journey to becoming a handler. It’s harder than you think.”

Now with only a couple of weeks left of K-9 school, these five new handlers will be showing what they learned in school at the upcoming K-9 graduation, then they’ll take their skills out to the streets. “The real training starts when we’re out,” said Deputy Zanandrie. “I can’t wait to get out on live tracks and really learn more about my K-9 partner and become the best team we can be.”

For Deputy Hunter however, while he’ll miss his classmates, he’s already established some competition between his partner Magz and Deputy Zanandrie’s partner, Drogo. “I’m excited for our first catch and all the catches after. Magz and I have had a lot of talks about getting a catch before Drogo.”

In addition to being K-9 handlers, being cognizant of their decision making and officer safety is still one of the top priorities that Deputy LoRusso likes to stress before his students leave the safety net of K-9 school. “It’s impossible to prepare them for every situation,” said Deputy LoRusso. “At the end of school the final thing I say – and this is one of the reasons why I love K-9 – no matter what the situation or obstacle is: improvise, adapt, and overcome.”

As our journey alongside K-9 school ends, their pursuit to becoming top dog still continues. The past 14 weeks have been nothing short of memorable for these five new canine handlers. As they respond to calls and interact with the public that they serve, the lessons they learned in K-9 school will follow them throughout their careers as law enforcement officers.

Don’t miss the opportunity to celebrate the achievements of the newest handlers on Tuesday, April 26th at Pinellas Park High School for K-9 Graduation. Graduation starts at 7PM and is free to the public. For more information on the event visit the Facebook event here.
Job Feature: Deputy – Aircraft Pilot 
Be our eyes in the sky! Our Flight Unit is seeking an experienced Aircraft Pilot.

Requirements include:
  • Maintaining a current Commercial/Instrument FAA Fixed Wing Pilot Certificate
  • Maintaining a current Class II Medical Certificate
  • Completing law enforcement training as required by the State of Florida, or registration for the Equivalency of Training (EOT) Program
For more information including a full list of qualifications, click here.