On a Monday night, just after sunset, streetlights cast West 13th Street in yellow. No one is coming or going from the Clark County jail nearby, save for the occasional officer. Televisions are on inside the Dragonfly Cafe at the Clark County Public Service Center, but no one’s around to watch them.
Out here, the loudest sound is the hum of a building that never goes quiet—the Clark Regional Emergency Services Agency (CRESA).

It’s dim inside the dispatch center as operator Cassandra Deering settles into her chair for her late-night shift.

The 36-year-old clips on her headset and adjusts her six computer monitors. It’s 9 p.m. As most of Clark County winds down for the night, she’s gearing up for the calls that come into 9-1-1 after dark.

The phone rings, signaling her first call of the night.

“9-1-1, how can I help you?” she asks.

It’s a medical call. These make up the bulk of the emergencies that are dispatched to fire departments. Deering moves through a script of questions to get a better idea of what’s wrong with the patient, a woman in a group home.

Around the room, other operators are taking 9-1-1 calls and dispatching emergency personnel.

“Ma’am ma’am, I need you to calm down. OK?” Deering’s co-worker says. “I understand, and I’m going to help you, but I need you to calm down and stop yelling.”

It can get stressful here.

Deering sends medics to the group home. For most medical calls, she never learns how they end. Her job is to figure out the problem, send the closest emergency units and hope for the best.

“We’re so used to being strong for the public,” Deering said. “We can’t break down because if we break down, someone could get hurt or die.”

Still, every dispatcher has their moment. Deering’s happened her first year. She had to be sent home and talk to a counselor after a particularly difficult call regarding a man who took his own life. His wife called 9-1-1 and recited a suicide note that she found.

“I continued to take the call, but I was bawling,” Deering said.

She hasn’t had a tough call like that in a while.

At about 9:40 p.m., a woman calls 9-1-1 saying she thinks her brother is doing drugs in the house across the street. She saw him go into the house three hours prior.

“What types of drugs is he on?” Deering asks.

Deering searches the man’s records and finds he has several warrants out for his arrest and he’s punched an officer before.

“It’s not just going to be one or two units. We’ll probably send more than that,” Deering said. “When the officers go there they’re going to use more caution because he’s probably going to try to resist or take off.”

A map on her computer shows patrol cars en route to the call, along with the locations of other ambulances, police and fire engines responding to calls throughout the county. She never realized just how big Clark County is until she took this job. When she checks the map again, patrol cars are parked around the house.

After 10 years dispatching 9-1-1 calls, Deering knows anything can happen anytime, anywhere.

“People think ’cause they live maybe in a nicer neighborhood that it’s safer. It just depends. You just get different types of crimes,” Deering said. “We’ve had situations where it was a so-called nice area and that’s where the murder happened down the street or, somebody has a meth lab that nobody knows about, but it’s in a nice area. I don’t believe there are any nice areas anymore.”

Police are tied up on the city’s west side when a man calls, worried about people who are cussing at him in a parking lot. There’s always something going on, whether it’s an emergency or not. Still, Deering acknowledges it’s an emergency.

“You just never know what someone’s going through, especially when they’re calling for help— how desperate they are,” Deering says. “It’s a humbling experience.”

A man calls 9-1-1 to report that someone appears to be stealing metal from a construction site near a Dairy Queen. She lauds people’s good intentions, even if the calls turn out to be nothing.

“We get all types of people who call in,” she said. “A lot of people just want to chat for a second, kind of be validated, dignified for a second, and then they’re fine.”

She gets calls from lonely people who want to talk; parents seeking help disciplining their kids; and people with mental illness making a cry for help.
When it’s quiet, she talks with them for a while. Otherwise, she points them to resources and tells them she has to let them go.

All of the calls are recorded, and Deering knows this all too well. A couple years ago, she went home around midnight for her break. As she was leaving her house, she saw the bushes rustling near her house and believed there was someone hiding there. She screamed and ran back into her house, where she called her co-workers at 9-1-1. The imagined intruder in the bushes turned out to be a group of possums.

“I’ve never been able to live that down. They tease me about it still to this day,” Deering said. “They saved the recording and kept playing it over and over again.”

She’s not paranoid like she was when she first started out. She’s more aware of her surroundings, according to Deering.

“That’s the part of the dispatcher that never really sleeps,” she says.