According to WECT, a 911 dispatcher was suspended for three days without pay for “unprofessional conduct” in advising a scared driver outside Chadbourn, N.C., “Don’t ever stop there, ever.”
Officials told WECT it was not policy for telecommunicators to provide personal advice. So there could well be a professionalism issue here that I’m not downplaying. Still, this part of the story stuck out to me:
Manager Bob Jones called the dispatcher’s actions unprofessional.
“I could not believe what I heard,” he said. “It’s disappointing because we’ve been doing a lot to change that image of Chadbourn.”
Right, well, OK — but it isn’t primarily the 911 dispatcher’s words doing harm to Chadbourn’s effort at cleaning up its image. It’s what prompted the 911 call in the first place: two guys randomly shooting the driver’s car, shattering two back windows and damaging her fender, as she drove through town.
From the article’s conclusion, it does seem as if Chadbourn is indeed trying to address the image problem. The article notes that “Jones said the police department made more felony arrests in the past month than in the past year,” including the two 18-year-olds who fired upon the car.
The other odd detail of the story: among those surprised by the 911 dispatcher’s advice was the driver whose car had just been randomly fired upon.
Had she or her husband or both been killed, then what? It seems like Chadbourn came very close to having an awful incident that would have gathered national attention.
