A life of duty for officers

By Sean Orfila
Online Forty-Niner
Staff Writer

In the front office of the University Police station, Elna Anderson sat behind a thick glass window and reclined in a big black chair. She stared at the wall and smiled, relieved from a brief pause in the hectic communications room at University Police headquarters.

"You've got to be able to multi-task," said Elna, one of the three police dispatchers at Cal State Long Beach's police department. Her long strawberry-blond hair rested on the back of the chair while a line of people began forming at the window behind her. In a matter of seconds, Elna was answering a 9-1-1 call, monitoring the chatter of the police radio and dealing with a frustrated woman at the front window — all at the same time.

Elna has a busy job. But as she worked, Elna remained surprisingly relaxed and calm throughout the madness of her work.

The police dispatcher handles a vast range of phone calls from the public.

"People call the police for everything," said Elna after answering a call from a woman who called to report a distempered squirrel on campus. The phone rang again — somebody was stuck in an elevator.

"We get a lot of calls from people who can't find their car. They usually think it's stolen," said Elna. The police almost always"find the lost vehicles — but occasionally they're actually stolen.

Inside the communications room, the police dispatcher is surrounded in the latest technology. The dispatcher uses a headset to answer phone calls and communicate to officers on the radio. The dispatcher can monitor more than six radio frequencies at once, including Long Beach Police and Fire, as well as other emergency frequencies. The dispatcher also receives calls from the emergency poles and phones scattered around campus. The machines inside the room pulsate with waves of human communication 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

About every 30 seconds, an old Microline 320 computer printer noisily ejects bulletins of suspected rapists, murderers, car thieves and runaway children on the loose in southern California.

At any given time there is a tremendous amount of information being processed in the room. Aside from the computers, the waiting room outside is filled to capacity with people being processed for fingerprinting. A sign posted next to the window reads: "Please direct all live scans questions to the live scan person" in big bold letters. Still, almost every person at the window asks a question about fingerprinting. Elna patiently points to the room next door and repeats the words on the sign.

"Some people just aren't aware of their surroundings," she said with a laugh and an exasperated look, "It's amazing. How could you not see that sign?"