Training Scars: Dispatch and the Cost of Absence

By Special Guest Writer

Rhiannon Martinez

Public-Safety Dispatcher

I am a Dispatcher. I love this profession; I have spent a decade in it and I intend to dedicate my entire career to the support of it. I have learned to do work that most of the world will never see or fully understand.

Over time, I have noticed something that I can no longer look past.

Dispatchers are routinely excluded from the very training environments where response systems are designed, tested, and improved. Dispatchers train other dispatchers to execute decisions, yes. However, they are rarely seated in the rooms where those decisions are shaped. The longer I work in this field, the more I believe this isn’t just a cultural oversight; it’s a structural flaw in how we prepare for emergencies.

If 9-1-1 professionals are truly the first first-responders… the ears that hear emergencies before anyone else, the decoders of the first pieces of information, and the ones who decide what initial responses will look like…. why are some agencies still training them as if their role begins after the most important decisions have already been made?

I wonder if we are preparing dispatchers for execution but not educating them on design. Are we asking them to manage complex, dynamic situations without ever providing them with a real arena to practice within those systems?

What would change if 9-1-1 professionals were trained from day one as partners in response, rather than just participants in the process?

Years ago, I came across a story about an incident now commonly referred to as the “Newhall shooting”. In 1970, four California Highway Patrol officers were killed during what began as a traffic stop of known robbery suspects in Valencia, California. Within minutes of the initial stop, all four officers were dead.

The incident shook the police profession not just because of the loss, but because of how much went wrong. It has been studied, analyzed, and debated for decades. But what most people agree on is this: Newhall forced law enforcement to take a hard look at how deeply training shapes behavior under stress. It changed how the profession understood realism, not just technically, but psychologically.

Newhall gave rise to a concept many instructors now refer to as “training scars.” The idea that under pressure, people don’t rise to the occasion; instead, they fall back on whatever they have practiced most. Habits formed in training become instincts in real-life, even when those habits no longer make sense in the moment.

I didn’t learn about Newhall in a dispatch class. I didn’t hear about it in a PSAP training. It wasn’t in a manual or an after-action report written for my profession.

I found it in a law enforcement book written by an officer, for officers. I stumbled across it almost by accident while trying to become a better trainer. I was thirsty for knowledge about how people learn, how performance is shaped, and what training gives us when things fall apart.

Suddenly, I was deep into a story that had nothing to do with dispatch on the surface, yet felt incredibly relevant to it.

What struck me wasn’t just the incident itself. It was how much analysis had come from it. Concepts like stress response, realism, repetition, and default behavior… all of this language, all of this research came from what feels like a screen door just outside my own profession.

And I found myself wondering: why hasn’t this crossed over more fully into dispatch?

I realized that many of the ideas shaping how I think about learning, performance, and preparation were developed for other disciplines: first law enforcement, fire, and military, but not dispatch. This isn’t criticism. This is simply an observation.

It made me wonder how many dispatchers, like me, are building their professional philosophy by borrowing from worlds that were never fully designed for us.

And then it made me think about something deeper.

If training scars exist because people default to what they’ve practiced, then what happens when dispatch isn’t included in training at all?

What kind of scars are we creating, not through bad habits, but through absence?

When dispatchers are not part of scenario planning, tabletop exercises, or live drills, we are unintentionally building gaps in shared experience. We are asking field-responders to operate in high-stress environments without having ever practiced communication with the very people coordinating their response. We are asking dispatchers to support complex, evolving incidents without ever having been allowed to see how those incidents are designed, discussed, or in many cases, debriefed.

In that sense, the scars aren’t just ours. They belong to the system.

Field-responders carry them when they expect information dispatch was never trained to anticipate or to disperse. Dispatchers carry them when they hesitate to speak in rooms they’ve never been invited into, or in the after-action, afraid to contribute to what they don’t understand. Agencies carry them when communication breaks down in moments that demand seamless coordination.

Not because anyone failed. But because we trained, or lacked training, in our separate worlds.

Newhall taught law enforcement that systems don’t fail because people are weak. They fail because people were trained for one version of reality and asked to survive in another.

And that feels uncomfortably familiar.

We call dispatchers the “first first-responders,” but we often train them as if they arrive late to the story. We teach them how to move pieces, but not how the board is built. We expect them to manage complexity without ever letting them practice inside it.

This is why I believe the future of dispatch training needs more than policies and checklists, even though those matter.

It needs more presence. More shared experience. More cross-discipline learning. More opportunities to see how decisions are made, not just how they’re executed.

Because training doesn’t just shape performance. It shapes confidence. It shapes voice. It shapes whether people feel like they belong in the systems they are being asked to support.

And when dispatches are missing from training, we are not just under-preparing dispatchers. We are under-preparing the entire response.

We are creating training scars not because we taught the wrong thing, but because we didn’t invite the right people into the room. 

About the Author:

Rhiannon Martinez is a Public Safety Dispatcher and Trainer in the San Francisco Bay Area with over a decade of experience in emergency communications. She currently serves as Assistant Training Coordinator and is actively involved in developing curriculum and supporting new dispatchers entering the profession. Rhiannon is the Team Leader of her agency's Tactical Dispatch Team and is an active member of Peer Support. She is passionate about improving training for 9-1-1 professionals and building heathier, more sustainable careers in public-safety.