The dispatchers at over 20 different police and fire agencies around the Mid-South each respond differently to my calls at 3 in the morning.  Some of the dispatchers are bored and just happy to talk to someone.  Others are bored and sound annoyed at the interruption.  Most of them sound bored and half-asleep.  I know from the soft, slightly slurred words what their answer is before I hear it.  “Nope,” they sigh.  “Everything is quiet.”   Sometimes the police scanner is quiet for so long between bursts of static, I check that it’s still on and functioning properly.  At this hour even the lights of the Memphis skyline are mostly dark and even usually busy Union Ave. is empty.  There are bigger, scarier cities than Memphis, but Memphis has its own bad reputation - well deserved in some cases - but even a city of this size and notoriety has to sleep sometime. 

Media are often blamed for reporting only bad news, following the mantra of “if it bleeds, it leads.”  In many cases that’s true.  If there’s no body, either at the morgue or in critical condition at The Med, you probably won’t see it on any local media web site.  You won’t see it on the front page of the paper or on the evening news. 

As sleepy as the dispatchers are though, as quiet as the streets appear to be, there is still activity between the long silences on the scanner.  Some of the calls are routine, check-ups on units by the stations.  There are more than a few medical calls – from heart attacks to overdoses.  A disturbing number of the calls are burglary calls, people prowling around empty buildings and cars at night or tripping alarms in the early morning darkness.  The remaining calls are fights, disturbances, and shots fired but without a source or target.  A young man was stabbed in the arm at a party.  A young woman beat up her mom at their apartment.  Two men wave guns at one another at a city intersection.   A couple is shouting at one another on their front lawn at 4 a.m.  This is what we hear at night, the dispatchers across the Mid-South, from Olive Branch to Covington, from West Memphis to Collierville, and a couple of guys who work overnight at the paper.

The significant thing about all of this is, quite often, nothing ever happens as a result.  The police show up.  The disturbance is quieted, and no one gets seriously hurt.   Despite all the calls about a person with a gun, no one gets shot.  Despite the fights and arguments, no one gets taken to The Med. 

The sun brightens the floor-to-ceiling windows of The Commercial Appeal’s online department, and I make my calls again. Still nothing.  For this overnight guy, whose job is to report when awful things happen while everyone else sleeps, that is some comfort in a city like Memphis. 

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 24th, 2007 at 6:15 am and is filed under Memphis Overnight. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.