A Model For Recovery

Prior to my role as Director, Aurora 911 Emergency Communications went live on the medical, fire, and police protocols all at once in 2016, a decision that upper management drove without the involvement of frontline Emergency Dispatchers.

Though the adoption of the Medical Priority Dispatch System^™ (MPDS^®) and the Fire Priority Dispatch System^™ (FPDS^®) went well, the Aurora (Colorado, USA) Emergency Dispatchers’ experience with the Police Priority Dispatch System^™ (PPDS^®) was highly problematic. Admittedly, the Police Protocol had less fluidity or agility at that time, which was causing a lot of frustration.

Without individual buy-in, calltakers began cultivating a wall of resistance, loathing the Police Protocol to the point that it became the scapegoat for all things going wrong. At that time, the center made no attempt to redefine or improve the system based on feedback to solve the problems Emergency Dispatchers were encountering.

Two weeks before I became Director (Dec. 30, 2019), the Interim Director turned off the PPDS as his parting gift to the Aurora Police Department (APD). They kept some of the initial Case Entry Questions and boiled down Chief Complaints to fewer broad categories, relying on a PDF document for future police call handling.

Seeing this as a win, calltakers thought they’d have a return to critical thinking, a faster process, and room for personal intuition and experience. Instead, they were introducing bias, forming assumptions, and jumping to conclusions—ultimately forming a disconnect.

The result was a huge lack of call data. It stopped telling the story of calls arriving in our center, the outcomes, and how police responded. All the data we no longer had documented through ProQA^® (Determinant Code, address, day of the week, time of day) created a blind spot for the police department, which set the stage for calamity.

In August 2019, there was a high-profile in-custody death related to ketamine use. A quick succession of police events soon revealed an angry, betrayed community. My prior 20 years with the Colorado State Patrol couldn’t have prepared me for what I was facing: Within a few months, we were locked down and everything was on fire. When the George Floyd incident occurred in Minnesota (USA) in May 2020, it was gasoline on kindling. That summer was difficult, handling a pandemic, demonstrations, and protests.

By August 2020, our team fielded a week’s worth of calls in 30 hours, and the emergency line was flooded with protesting calls, death threats, and comments no human being should hear. This catastrophic situation snowballed until the Aurora Police Department found themselves in a consent decree at the state level, entering a legally binding agreement to fix issues potentially threatening public safety.

Centralizing, standardizing, and elevating
As a first step to rebuild, we became our own entity, Aurora911, in January 2021. But there was still a daunting resistance. It took until the end of 2024 to secure funding and gain stakeholder buy-in from APD to reintroduce the standardization of the PPDS.

This time we built the system together. Jason Barbour, then Priority Dispatch Corp.^™ EPD Implementation and Client Support Specialist (now Vice President of Client Operations) and his team set up shop in my office. We brought in small groups of five to six employees at a time to listen to their prior experience and their fears of going back.

After collaboration to address these concerns, Barbour walked everyone through how the PPDS had changed, highlighting ECHO fast tracks, customization, and flexibility that allowed us to build the system we needed. These conversations helped reduce the fear and resistance they had for the system they once abandoned with celebration.

From these discussion groups, many became early adopters, getting certified and leading the team. Our calltakers were invested, having had a hand in laying the groundwork. As a final piece, current Police Chief Todd Chamberlain started his tenure only a few months prior to our implementation. He understood the power of data and how it supports our responders by prioritizing what is important to them.

Our PPDS go-live date was incredibly smooth, which I attribute to involving those closest to the work by giving them a seat at the table. Calltakers briefed APD patrol in their briefings, helping to bring about changes with our partners. We created a SharePoint with frequently asked questions and a card with all the Chief Complaints and suffixes to ease the transition. We also worked with our CAD provider to adjust displays to show layman’s terms for better understanding.

We are already seeing the wins in the data. We were able to show our police chief how the department is successfully responding to critical moments of life and safety with consistency and accountability.

Addressing habits and mindsets
Transforming the culture and gatekeeping of old habits has been a process. For instance, we recognized a trend of calltakers “protecting” officers from taking certain incidents, which violated policy. Calltakers were also used to working off a psychological assumption of an incident based on the first utterances of the caller, assigning an event type prior to asking questions.

It was clear there were remnants of old mindsets. We had to counter the emerging resistance with data. We addressed rising concerns head-on, saying, “You feel like using the PPDS takes longer, but your call processing time has reduced by 20 seconds.”

We found the heralding question to be “What is true?” We reviewed each issue in a very visible way, and we discovered resistance is based on fear of not having mastery. Even if the prior system was dysfunctional, it was the devil they knew. Losing that familiarity was unsettling to our calltakers.

Once we started making the needed adjustments, we committed to showing wins and celebrating compliance. There is power in letting your newest employees with a pristine knowledge of call intake be your go-to. They took the lead because they aren’t trying to unlearn, which resulted in some power dynamic shifts. At first, these changes were unsettling to the hierarchy, but we learned together where our strengths are.

We paused, we pondered, we pivoted, and we repeated until we got the exact right recipe with everyone brought up to speed in both competence and confidence. This is a living process where we must check our pulse and make sure we’re healthy, continually focused on providing seamless service.

Conclusion
A great benefit of reimplementing the PPDS is that we have become more transparent. We are founded on processes that are vetted in science as a best practice internationally, and we have the data to show how we serve our community and our responders.

We’re now building bridges instead of digging moats, committing to fundamental changes that prioritize a connection to the people we serve. We once faced a gap wracked with pain, fielding rage and anger, and we felt like we were in a seemingly powerless place. We have shared our residual fears, and we’ve grown beyond them to cultivate a culture of collaboration, compliance, and success.

As the Director of Aurora911, I’m proud to say I’ve learned personally and professionally by facing our difficulties while focusing on consistency. I now know it’s the small decisions we make every day that really matter. I’m so proud of our team, their perseverance, and their hearts of gold. I strive to make our infrastructure and processes match their passions. My hope is to leave a legacy that can persevere beyond any one person or title. Now that we’ve come this far, what can’t we do together?