They listen to people in pain, but Fort Wayne's 911 emergency dispatchers had few people to listen to theirs.
The emotional kind that comes from talking to a child while Daddy is beating up Mommy in the background. Or Mommy's beating up Daddy. The rape victim seeking help. The accident victim trapped in a wreck or the person inside a building on fire.
Matthew Stultz doesn't pretend to know what it's like to handle those calls or to try to make sense of them. The Fort Wayne Police Department's newest chaplain understands his primary role is to listen.
“It's never really something that you can make sense of, but it just helps them work through it,” said Stultz, 34, who was sworn in Monday and assigned to minister to the city's dispatchers. “Everybody reacts to things differently, so there's really no way to know before I sit down and get to know someone how I can help them.”
City dispatchers answered 734,499 emergency and non-emergency calls last year and averaged 1,608 calls last month, according to communications center officials. Many are mundane, but some are a matter of life and death requiring dispatchers to go from zero to 60 mph mentally.
“One call may be somebody saying, ‘Hey, they didn't pick up my garbage,' and then the next one may be a house fire where there's children trapped,” said Susan D. Rarey, center operations manager and a dispatcher from 1988 to 1998. “It just goes from one extreme to the next.”
Unlike firefighters or police officers, dispatchers don't deal face to face with the public and no formal system exists to inform a dispatcher how a call he or she took was resolved. Rarey said the most difficult calls to handle emotionally involve the deaths of children. Dispatchers took the Feb. 25 drowning of a 9-year-old boy and his 4-year-old brother hard.
“The tough thing is we still have to keep going because the phones don't stop ringing,” said Tina Taviano, the city's communications director. “It's nice that we can get someone for the dispatchers to be able to talk to.”
The Allen County Sheriff's Department's chaplain, Dick Sievers, primarily ministers to prisoners, officers and the families of crime victims.
Stultz, who has been Simpson United Methodist Church's senior minister since 2006, will tap into his experience as a volunteer chaplain with the Marion Police Department where he rode with officers and received critical-incident and stress-management training and certification.
“With that training in the background, it was a lot easier to come into Fort Wayne,” said Stultz, who after being sworn in visited the communications center with his wife, Heather, and their daughter, Brianna, 2.
Stultz will minister at the center during dispatchers' breaks.
