“Jamie” is one of San Francisco’s most experienced 911 emergency dispatchers, and she has seen many evolutions in the department during her time there. Nothing has made her want to speak out, however, as much as the struggles in staffing and competence she has witnessed in the last several years.
Those struggles are endangering lives, said Jamie, who, like other dispatchers, asked that she not be named for fear of professional repercussions.
She recalled one newly trained dispatcher who, in the span of a single week, made two potentially fatal errors. In the first, he delayed a “not breathing/no pulse” dispatch by several minutes due to confusion, instead of immediately triggering a medical response within 60 seconds and then gathering more information. A few days later, he allegedly fumbled another crucial incident: A call from a 10-year-old for his unconscious mother.
The new dispatcher wasn’t sure of how to route the call, and asked a supervisor for assistance. Instead of sending EMTs immediately, the supervisor allegedly told the dispatcher to treat it as an “unknown” medical call and send a street crisis team, sans medics. By the time they realized a medic was needed, about seven minutes had passed — an eternity in dispatch, Jamie said. (Other dispatchers who spoke to Gazetteer SF corroborated the details of both incidents.)
Most frustrating for Jamie and others, however, was the lack of accountability afterward. “They weren’t pulled off the phones or put into retraining. They didn’t get more monitoring. You should be off the phones if you messed up that big, twice in one week,” she said. “None of that happened, even though the [new dispatcher] was still in a probationary period.”
Talk to the city’s veteran dispatchers, and all of them have similar stories. They say the problem isn’t individual, but systemic: Rampant burnout in the dispatch office, poorly trained colleagues, and longstanding mismanagement have shredded morale and strained capacity over several years.
The city Department of Emergency Management, which operates the 911 center, oversees planning, preparation, response, and recovery for all kinds of incidents in the city, from flash floods to petty theft to homicides. It is one of the most frequently used services by SF residents; the DEM oversees 162 dispatchers, including 26 who are currently working while in training and not fully “released.” The department’s budget for the 2025-26 fiscal year is $161.6 million
In a statement to Gazetteer, the department suggested that it is emerging from pandemic era staffing shortages stronger than ever. But glaring systemic issues continue to hurt the dispatch office, according to six veteran dispatchers with more than 100 collective years of experience. They spoke to Gazetteer on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the media.
Their descriptions paint a picture of a crucial department in disarray, with dispatchers struggling with exhaustion, grossly outdated equipment, inconsistent enforcement, and a deep-seated feeling that DEM’s leaders, Executive Director Mary Ellen Carroll and Deputy Director Robert Smuts, do not care about the welfare of rank-and-file dispatchers.
“The feeling in the air is that we basically have a vote of no confidence in management,” said “Roger,” a dispatcher who has been in the SF office for decades.
DEM declined Gazetteer’s request to sit in at the dispatch office and to speak with Carroll and Smuts for this article.
The cumulative impact of these problems, dispatchers say, is eroding public safety while wasting city dollars. Those who spoke for this story agreed that the problems they see can and will put citizens and first responders at risk of critical delays or other, potentially fatal mistakes.
“I’ve been trying to talk to anybody who will listen for the past 10 years, trying to let them know that people are dying because of negligence there,” Jamie said. “People are miserable here.”
“The public safety element has not improved, despite what the department says about improved hiring,” added “Mandy,” who has trained new dispatch recruits in addition to her job taking calls.
As Mandy puts it, the issue for dispatchers “isn’t that we’re negligent or don’t care.” It’s that an extensive history of poor management, even since before the pandemic, has created a system that fails to consistently address, let alone improve, the performance of dispatchers, their mental health, and the lack of experience from supervisors.
One problem of this system is the chronic struggle for dispatchers to get time off, be it for vacation or bereavement, coupled with a major push for dispatchers to take on overtime in the last several years.
The need for overtime grew substantially as hiring plummeted amid COVID lockdowns, but even before then, existing dispatchers were pushed to pick up extra shifts or face mandatory, manager-assigned overtime without any choice in scheduling. The dispatchers in this story acknowledged that they are getting paid well, but they also stressed that the pay doesn’t blunt the negative effects of not being able to properly rest.
“I’ve been working 12-hour days since I started. I do 14-hour days right now, four days a week. And they’re asking more from us,” Roger said. “Dispatchers are going to leave. Or they’ll just call in sick. Why would they care? They’re burned out, and you can’t get time off. So it throws our staffing numbers off. Management is constantly scrambling for overtime.”
While dispatchers do technically have discretionary time off, Mandy told Gazetteer that it “only exists on paper.”
“You will never get approval for it,” she said. Mandy also described an instance last year when management allegedly made it difficult for her coworker and dispatchers close to him to attend his mother’s funeral.
“We have a job where our mental health is so important, but we can’t take our choice of a day off?” she said. “I joke with some coworkers that I’ve been treated better in a retail gig.”
The dispatchers also criticized DEM’s decision last year to kill compensatory time off, in which workers trade overtime wages for days off. The practice was “standard for decades,” Jamie said, and was a helpful workaround for dispatchers, especially those who need to use the unpaid time off provided to them by the Family and Medical Leave Act or workman’s comp, but want to “catch up” with overtime later.
In an emailed response to Gazetteer’s questions, DEM stated that “mandatory overtime is down about 75 percent” and that the dispatch office, for the first time since 2021, met the state standard for answering 90% of emergency calls within 15 seconds. Spokesperson Jackie Thornhill said compensatory time off was eliminated because it “creates operational challenges” and that “Division of Emergency Communications leadership consistently work to grant as many discretionary days off as possible.”
Some dispatchers hope the improvement in staffing could make it easier to take time off. Others aren’t buying it. “I consider it smoke and mirrors. We’re going to run into issues again when we lose staff during the year,” Roger said.
I consider it smoke and mirrors. We’re going to run into issues again when we lose staff during the year.
In addition to the burnout, the dispatchers in this story all said that inconsistent standards with recruiting, hiring, and training has led to a crisis of competency, made worse by a lack of intervention and accountability from dispatch supervisors and their managers.
Hirees are paid full salary (which starts at about $110,000 a year) when they begin training, which includes six weeks of classroom work, three months of on-the-job phone training, two to three months of solo call-answering, and three more months for police radio training.
After completing training, new dispatchers are put on a six-month probationary period. According to DEM, eight hires from its September 2024 class passed training and have stayed as dispatchers. Of the three classes in 2025, 31 hires remain in training currently. The department says the “recent low” in total dispatchers, including those in training, was 131 staffers in 2023.
Even with a rise in hiring, Roger remains very concerned about what he calls the “lowered standards” for dispatchers-in-training and the total cost of putting someone through training with a full salary, which he estimates is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Fellow veterans on the dispatch floor “know right off the bat who we ain’t going to hire,” Roger said, and the tension has only grown with DEM’s recent recruiting push to improve its staffing numbers.
“With civil service rules, you have to be fair and give people an equal chance, but does management want to just waste money?” Roger said. “I think the level of candidates has dropped, and that’s because of recruiting as much as it is the candidate or training. It’s a let’s-grab-anybody mentality.”
“Norah,” a fellow senior dispatcher, believes the same thing.
“They’re hiring anyone with a pulse,” she said. “There’s a lot of intelligence that left the building already because they were not treating people well.”
In one example from 2025, a dispatch trainer was working with a new recruit who had a history of failing training tasks. The recruit racked up multiple “remedial extensions” to fix his errors, and his trainer wrote a detailed review that explicitly stated the recruit should not be “released” as a full-time dispatcher because he is incapable of doing the job.
That feedback was ignored, to the department’s detriment, according to several veteran dispatchers. An inability to handle calls solo is a problem these dispatchers have noticed with a dozen other new hires, they said.
Perhaps the worst blow comes when a candidate enters SF’s dispatch academy, receives training and full salary, and then leaves for other agencies around the Bay Area and beyond, said “Leslie,” another dispatcher with decades on the job.
“Good talent is leaving because they’re thinking, ‘Hey, this is supposed to be a stable, good job.’ But the only good thing is the pay. It’s not even like the bad apples are washing out. It’s all levels of talent, including high performers,” Leslie said.
Good talent is leaving because they’re thinking, ‘Hey, this is supposed to be a stable, good job.’ But the only good thing is the pay.
The dispatchers Gazetteer interviewed unanimously pointed to DEM leadership as the problem on this front, especially because of a lax environment where some mistakes, like showing up a few minutes late to the office, are written up for poor performance, while serious mistakes, like routing a critical call incorrectly, are glossed over. Some complain that supervisors and especially managers, the latter reporting directly to Carroll and Smuts, often have less experience taking calls than rank-and-file dispatchers yet hold significantly more power to make decisions on training and accountability.
Leslie summed it up: “They’re trying to hurry and get people in and keep them. It’s quantity, not quality.”
Worsening everything is a general lack of proper equipment and communication, which erodes the ability to respond swiftly and effectively to emergencies, dispatchers say. Norah, Jamie, and others claimed that the office runs on extremely poor, outdated technology and equipment that is actively failing. One dispatcher noted that the phones and “Computer Aided Dispatch” system are so dodgy that sometimes they “cannot hear police radio calls,” which could have fatal consequences.
“It’s absolutely mind-boggling. This is San Francisco. We have the biggest tech companies in the world. And somehow we’re on pen and paper for schedules. And they tell me we have no software that can do it right,” Roger said.
This is San Francisco. We have the biggest tech companies in the world. And somehow we’re on pen and paper for schedules.
And when new technology does get introduced into the dispatch system, it’s often senior dispatchers who are left flying in the dark, trying to figure out how to use it. Two dispatchers specifically noted that the staff was left in the dark about new license-plate-reading technology to track a criminal incident. Norah said it took “six or seven months” from initial implementation for dispatchers to receive documentation on how to handle calls that use digital technology like Flock’s LPR cameras and Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites.
“Nobody warned us about using it. We don’t communicate properly with the police department. The supervisors don’t know what’s going on half the time,” Norah said.
Her impression is that, in the last few years, the people who are most qualified and capable have been forced to contend with a toxic work environment that encourages bad habits.Those who speak up get a target on their back, Norah claimed — a sentiment also held by others interviewed for this story. They noted that a number of senior dispatchers are planning to leave in coming years.
“With a lot of OG dispatchers retiring or leaving from burnout, you’re going to see officer and firefighter and residents’ lives in danger if we don’t change how dispatch runs,” Jamie said.
The dispatchers interviewed by Gazetteer unanimously agreed that DEM director Carroll and deputy director Smuts have been repeatedly informed of these concerns. They also believe the duo has failed to address them.
Cliqueish behavior, a lack of accountability, and varying levels of effort — especially from managers — have worn morale to a new low, said “Paula,” a veteran dispatcher who has trained new hires in the past. Paula believes that many “supervisors do not do their jobs” other than to make the employee schedule, and she observed a growing culture of “quiet quitting” from fellow employees — and herself.
“I’m not proud to say this, but I now work slower. I do it because… well, why am I answering so many phone calls while the next dispatcher over is doing one? Who is going to address that?"
