Lawmakers heard testimony from 911 dispatchers and union officials about the critical situation inside the police radio room at PPD headquarters in Center City.
Workers and their union representatives told City Council on Thursday that coronavirus cases have been significantly affecting civilian workforces in the dispatch room, and their requests for help in this regard have had a weak response from department management, workers and their union.
To date, over 30 dispatchers have contracted the virus, many of them during November.
Billy Penn reported that inside their tightly packed workspace, dispatchers said they have been separated from each other with what they described as makeshift cardboard barriers.
Personnel strength is now 20% lower than the department’s allocation for dispatching police. Persistent absences due to infection or exposure to COVID have further affected the understaffed civilian unit, members said, as call volume has increased this year.
The unit has 220 dispatchers in total, but “there is no less than about 50 or 60 dispatchers out with COVID-related symptoms or having to quarantine,” said dispatcher Michell Lynn who testified via Zoom because she herself was under quarantine.
Dispatchers, who are as essential to emergency response to police officers but paid far less than the average cop, said the negligence is a symptom of the department treating civilian workers like second-class citizens.
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Hearing testimony from the workers, Council vowed to address some health safety measures, like securing more Plexiglass barriers to separate dispatchers at work.
Dispatchers who testified also aired grievances about other pressures placed on workers in the unit, compounding difficulty and stress.
Lynn, said she and her colleagues have been struggling to implement new mental health screenings during 911 calls, which became mandatory in the wake of the October police killing of Walter Wallace Jr.
Collateral damage
“Workers weren’t properly trained”, Lynn said, adding that the screening process has resulted in more verbal attacks from callers. She said supervisors blamed dispatchers over the Wallace incident, and that the tensions between civilian workers and sworn police personnel are rising.
‘We’ve become the collateral damage of the police department,” Lynn said. “If something goes wrong, they blame the civilians.”
“The police department needs to do better with its civilian employees,” said Darnell Davis, a union representative for AFSCME Local 1637, which represents radio dispatchers and other civilian police personnel. If dispatchers complain, it results in retaliation, Davis said.
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