Michael Zona became a dispatcher with the North Haven Police Department 19 years ago, entering with a background in public safety as both a firefighter and EMT, which gave him a head-start for becoming the dispatcher the department needed at the time.

“I was a volunteer firefighter, I heard the guy that they hired flaked out, and left,” Michael says. “I put the application in, and within a day or two I had a job!”

Since then, Michael has been a dispatcher through numerous disasters, including tornadoes, snowstorms, and hurricanes. He also worked and met with members of the SWAT team who were injured in a large explosion on Quinnipiac Avenue in 2018.

His favorite part of being a dispatcher is the camaraderie among other dispatchers and the police officers with whom they work closely. He understands the stress officers can feel during the day and wants to make sure his friends aren’t the only ones protecting the North Haven community.

“We’re responsible for their life,” he says. “My thing is, they’re going to go home every night. My [dispatch] partner, or whoever else it is, we’re going to make sure you go home every night and provide them with the right information in a timely manner. Our job is to get people the proper service that they need in a timely and efficient manner. There’s no getting around it.”

When it comes to becoming a dispatcher who hopes to work and communicate with the police, the process through which that can manifest is far more extensive and educational than what is expected, as Michael insists.

“A lot of people think we just answer phones and talk on the radio,” he says. “We go through a lot of training. There’s a lot of things that are run through the state. We have a COLLECT system, which is the DMV [Department of Motor Vehicles] files. Through COLLECT, we can access DMV files, backgrounds, who has weapons, a rap sheet. That’s how we run license plates, licenses. Like you see on TV, the NCIC’s [National Crime Information Center] a real thing that’s nationwide, and everything gets cross-referenced through that.”

Dispatchers like Michael are also educated in 911 communications training, which includes garnering technical skills through systems such as Arcat and MailOne and mapping systems. Technological changes have made the performance of a responder more precise in execution, now being able to pinpoint the location of a caller in a specific room of a hotel, leaving out the guessing game of determining the position of a call through 911.

But while training for the long hours to which a dispatcher can commit themselves proves useful, so does learning what to do during those hours. That means sometimes bringing food, personal items such as a book, and even a toothbrush with them to work while simultaneously interacting with callers. The length of a job on a single day can be unpredictable, and last exactly as long as a day.

“It’s part of the job,” according to Michael. “We’re master multi-taskers. Per contract, we can only work 16 hours. In an emergency, we can work 20 if it’s needed. There have been dispatchers that were stuck there during a snowstorm, which makes 24 hours. You can go in one day and think you’re going home at 4 o’clock, and you’re going to go home at midnight. But everyone works overtime.”

Ultimately, it still comes down to helping the North Haven community for Michael. He is still a certified EMT, who previously was with American Medical Response, again crediting his background as a responder as a key part of his public safety background in turbulent situations, on top of being a firefighter.

“It definitely helped me with this because you have a little bit more of that aspect.”

Callers to NHPD dispatch can sometimes be very distressed, even hysterical, when on the phone with a dispatcher. To establish and maintain good and well-flowing communication, Michael says it’s the “reassuring” tone he sets for them that is the important first step in approaching an emergency that he, as the dispatcher, needs to solve.

“You need to be in control of a call because if you don’t take control of a call, it’s going to delay the response time from police, fire, EMS, whoever,” he says. “Every second counts. I want to know where you are, what’s happening, who, and when.”

As a longtime resident of North Haven, reassurance is established from the jump when Michael receives a call from a friend who feels they can trust him with a troubling situation. He needs to be impartial to every call, but he acknowledges that it hits familiar callers a little differently when they know he is on the other line.

“I usually don’t tell people who I am, but if they call, I’m like, ‘Is this so-and-so? It’s Mike. Oh, hey!’ You hear the relief in their voice. [They think], ‘this person knows me; they’re going to take really good care of me.”

Being a dispatcher doesn’t go without receiving some bizarre calls out of the tens of thousands Michael has answered for almost two decades.

“A guy, one night, called because his garage door was stolen. I said, ‘Push the button,” he recalls. “And it came down. Another guy called about a bright light following him in the sky, and it was the moon. You can’t make this up. We actually had a lot of UFO sightings when I first started.”

Zany or serious calls concerning a serious matter still signal to Michael just how much people rely upon and trust dispatchers like him.

“Sometimes people just want someone to talk to.”