From The 911 Files

The phone rings. You have no idea whether someone is dying, someone is dangerous, or someone is furious because McDonald’s ran out of fries.

You answer it anyway.

“Engagingly captures the anything-goes nature of emergency services work.”
—Kirkus Reviews

Behind every police pursuit, house fire, overdose, missing child, domestic disturbance, and medical emergency is a voice most people will never see.

The 911 dispatcher.

In From the 911 Files: True Crime Confessions from Behind the Phone, Jackson Anhalt takes readers inside the communications center, where tragedy and absurdity can arrive on the same line within seconds of each other.

There are murders.

Suicidal callers.

Children trying to find help.

Plane crashes, pursuits, domestic violence, bizarre deaths, and calls that continue to echo long after the headset comes off.

There are also angry cats, alleged UFOs, suspicious raccoons, people calling 911 over things that are absolutely not emergencies, and coworkers who have learned that sometimes the only way to survive the darkness is to laugh directly at it.

Because dispatchers don't get to choose what comes through the phone.

They only get to decide what happens next.

Drawing from events during Anhalt's years as a 911 dispatcher, with names, dates, and locations changed to protect the people involved, From the 911 Files combines true-crime accounts, emergency-service realities, dark humor, and an insider's explanation of a profession most people know only as a voice on the other end of the line.

Discover what happens when:

• A routine call becomes a murder investigation.
• A silent 911 call may be the only warning that someone is in danger.
• A child has to become the dispatcher’s only source of information.
• Officers, firefighters, medics, and dispatchers must coordinate while everything is going wrong.
• Technology cannot do nearly as much as television has taught us to believe.
• The person answering the phone has to remain calm while someone else’s world falls apart.

Anhalt also pulls back the curtain on the dispatch center itself: the mandatory overtime, split-second decisions, responder safety, gallows humor, friendships forged through chaos, calls that become impossible to forget, and the strange emotional whiplash of helping save a life before taking a barking-dog complaint two minutes later.

911 dispatchers hear people on the worst days of their lives. Then the phone rings again.

Funny, disturbing, compassionate, and sometimes unbelievable, From the 911 Files is an unfiltered look at the people who answer when the rest of us need help.

The calls may end. The voices don't always leave with them.

Praise for From the 911 Files

“Told in the honest, dry wit of someone who has been there… Full of heart, gritty truth, and enough humor to soften the blow.”
—Cheree Alsop, bestselling author

“An absolute page turner… It’s so much more than 911 dispatching.”
—Miranda Levi, award-winning author