WHITE RIVER JUNCTION — In the bathroom at the Hartford Emergency Communications Center, there are two radios and a phone atop the toilet tank. There’s a notepad and a pencil, and some classic lavatory reading material: a handbook on how to take 911 calls.
Christina Kramer once took a call about a traffic accident from the bathroom at work. When there’s nobody else working the phones, she’s always on duty — even when duty calls.
Toilet calls don’t happen often in Hartford, as the police department tries to prevent one-person shifts in the communications center. Sometimes, though, it has no other option: Hartford has a shortage of emergency communications specialists, something that shifts undue pressure onto Kramer and her small team of coworkers. They know that if they don’t show up for work, people who need help will have a harder time finding it.
Hartford has four open positions in its communications center, which, if filled, would add to a current team of just six specialists, responsible for covering the phones 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, preferably with more than one person working at a time.
Hartford’s short staffing problem is not unique. There are too few people answering and dispatching 911 calls nationally, according to a 2023 report from the International Academies of Emergency Dispatch. The survey conducted by IAED and the National Association of 911 Administrators indicated that the average vacancy rate in emergency communication centers across the country was about 25%.
Being a communications specialist doesn’t pay much, and often demands long hours punctuated by callers in distress. The background check process has a particularly high bar. The job requires a certain kind of compartmentalization as well as the ability to multitask and react fast. Social perception also likely plays a part, as public confidence in the police remains low, at 45% according to a Gallup poll from July.
“People don’t want to be cops,” Lt. William Furnari, a public information and police officer, said last Thursday.
In the dispatch room
Very little light makes it into the dispatch room where Kramer spends so much of her week. She and Sarah Morse, the other specialist on her Thursday shift, prefer it that way. They each get plenty of bright light from the eight computer screens on each of their desks, home to maps, lists of officers, security cameras, connection interfaces and resources for the national suicide hotline.
On this particular Thursday, Kramer pressed a button so that her desk rose to standing height, bringing her various monitors and phones with her. She has four landlines: One answers 911 calls, one is a backup for 911 calls, another answers calls straight to the department and the other is the backup for that. Kramer uses a thin microphone to dispatch police officers, fire fighters and EMTs.
She wore a gray hoodie branded with the communications center and a sparkly headband over close-cropped black hair. Her plastic water bottle read “KRAMER.”
A call came in and Kramer snapped into business mode. “Vermont 911, where is your emergency?” she asked the caller, who had witnessed an elderly woman faint outside a Dollar General. Kramer’s fingers flew over her keyboard, typing notes for herself so she didn’t forget any details when it came time for dispatch.
“Does anybody have any juice they can give her?” she asked, hearing that the woman was diabetic. On another screen, Kramer looked up the address of the Dollar General, then pressed a button to call in an ambulance.
As a communications specialist in Hartford, Kramer’s job is two-fold. She answers calls from the community and dispatches emergency services; at many communication centers, specialists only do one of those jobs. Vermont has six public safety answering points, each responsible for a geographic area so that when someone calls 911, their call goes to the closest available point. With understaffing an issue across the state, however, Kramer often answers calls from outside of Hartford’s catchment area, then has to dispatch to a different county’s emergency services force — not ideal, but effective enough.
“The best way this works is if the person answering the phone is also the person dispatching,” Furnari said.
A woman called 911 and told Kramer that her phone had been stolen. Kramer asked her a series of questions: “What is your name?” “Do you know what color the backpack was?”
After a few minutes of questions, Kramer put the phone down and turned to Furnari. “She said she’s had it with me,” she told him, a bemused expression on her face.
‘Crime doesn’t have a schedule’
Once or twice, Kramer has burnt her lunch because she left it on the stove when a call came through.
“Crime doesn’t have a schedule,” she said.
At 18, Kramer went to school for criminal justice at the New Hampshire Technical Institute in Concord. She thought she wanted to become a police officer, but decided she would rather work “behind the scenes,” and found herself in a dispatch room. Fifteen years later, she’s still working in one; Kramer, 47, has been a communications specialist in Hartford for nearly five years.
These days, she works between 65 and 70 hours a week, earning overtime pay when she goes past 40 hours. Her shifts range from 10- to 14-hour stretches, sometimes from 5 a.m. to 3 p.m., other times from 7 p.m. to 5 a.m. Kramer has blackout shades and a sound machine in her bedroom in Claremont so she can sleep when she has the time, whether that’s day or night.
This year, Kramer is scheduled to work on Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve, but has Christmas Day off. The police department has invited her to their Thanksgiving potluck.
Kramer is popular at work; in 2024, she won employee of the year. She interacts with police officers often, not only to communicate professionally but also to seek peer support for the more difficult parts of the job. Kramer herself is getting certified as a peer counselor, learning to help her colleagues deal with grief or trauma associated with their jobs. Sometimes, communication specialists have to help people through calls that bring up something personal. Other times, they know the caller. That has happened to Kramer.
“I try to detach by just trying to help them so that they can get what kind of help they’re looking for,” she said. “There are certain calls that can be emotional, but I try not to let it get to me.”
For Furnari, one of the biggest components of peer support comes informally, when officers tell communication specialists what happened with the call they answered or dispatched. Not knowing how a difficult situation turned out can contribute to anxiety for the communications team, he said.
“There’s an openness that comes from this kind of work,” Furnari said. “It can be stressful. It can be exciting. It can be a lot of different things, and that leads to stronger connections, as you’ve gone through things together, and makes communication easier and more direct.”
On her own, Kramer makes an effort to take care of herself by spending time with her son, going on walks around her neighborhood, working out at the gym. She tries to keep a busy personal life so that stress from work doesn’t affect her when she goes home.
This, of course, is one of the biggest reasons it has been hard for Hartford to hire communications specialists, even after posting open calls and offering walk-in tests in the Hartford Public Safety Building on VA Cutoff Road. For the 2027 Hartford budget, Police Chief Constance Kelley is requesting the funds for six more officers. The town currently employs 22, a number that has barely changed in the last decade, according to Furnari.
“We have not kept up with growth,” he said.
“It’s an awful lot,” Ken Hawkins, deputy director at the Vermont Police Academy, said Monday. “More and more folks have placed more emphasis on family, and time off, and not necessarily the attitude of service before self.”
Kramer, however, has been putting service first since she decided to pursue a career in public safety as a teenager. Every time a line rang Thursday, she stopped her conversations with Furnari mid-sentence, cradled the phone against her shoulder, and typed furiously with one hand. In an instant, her tone turned serious, her questions came quick. When Vermonters panic, Kramer locks in.
