Betty Lewis was just an average person. Admittedly, she didn’t set out in her life to join the criminal justice career. She started out as a manager for an apartment complex, but soon tired of receiving calls all day and night over frivolous things she had no control over. The added stress of living thirty miles away from her complex and being unable to rush to the building on short notice finally pushed Lewis to look in the classifieds for a new job. There, she found that the Minden Police Department needed a dispatcher. Lewis calls Minden home, which helped in her decision to apply. She also found a sense of personal satisfaction in being able to help people with real problems. However, there were some drawbacks. At the time, Minden was a small sleepy town with just 2,835 people. Due to a lack of demand, Minden had just one dispatcher on duty at a time. Lewis described her twelve-hour shifts as slow, but there was also an added pressure of needing to be available on a second’s notice. “If the phone happened to ring while you were in the bathroom, you were running out with your pants unbuttoned,” she remarked with a laugh. Lewis remained in …show more content…
These people dedicate their entire selves to taking phone calls, just hoping to help. They must deal with never knowing how they did. They may never know if someone who needed immediate medical attention lived or died. In situations where a caller hangs up and doesn’t answer return calls, they must keep that feeling of loss and frustration under control so they can be there to help someone else. Dispatchers are the silent heroes standing in the shadows and on behalf of Buffalo county, I took the time to thank Betty Lewis for her effort and the good she did during her time as a dispatcher as well as for the incredible interview. It really opened my eyes to this side of law enforcement I had never even thought