You can ask my man right here with the broken neck

911 is a joke. We should all know that by now. If patrol officers didn’t have to always be ready to answer the next bullshit call, they could do a lot more to prevent crime. I’ve written about this.

I’ve always argued that while rapid response doesn’t make sense for police, it does for ambos and fire trucks. David Kohn writes in the Baltimore Sun that there are problems with repeat 911 for ambulances as well. One person called for an ambo every third day:

Baltimore's busy public ambulance service went out on more than 150,000 calls last year, responding to everything from car accidents to heart attacks. About 2,000 of those calls were from the same 91 people.
…
"We want to get these people better healthcare so they don't call 911 so much," said Dr. Joshua M. Sharfstein, Baltimore's commissioner of health.

I’d like to give people better police service so they don’t call 911 so much.

One woman in my sector called police at least 600 times a year. She’d call a couple times a day starting around 5am when she got up to sweep the street. She called for drug dealing. She was right. There was drug dealing. It’s just too bad we couldn’t really do anything about it. Not with her calling 911 so much.

911 is still a joke

In his blog, Bradford Plumer writes a thoughtful analysis of one chapter of Cop in the Hood (scroll down to “Call a Cab Cause a Cab Will Come Quicker,” and the comments in particular).

I learned of a 911 operator in Detroit criminally convicted of negligence for failing to take a call from a 5-year-old boy seriously. The boy's mom died. But I listened to the call. She shouldn’t have taken the call seriously. She was right (even if in this case she was dead wrong)!

No city has tried to "unsell" the public on 911. It is way too tough, politically.

People think that 911 saves lives (and it does for fire and ambo). I think the first job is to educate the public about the "bullshit" nature of the majority of 911 calls.

It's too easy to say police need to respond to every call without understanding how this response isn't feasible. Responding to thousands of needless 911 calls prevents the police from getting out of their cars and doing the kind of real police work that would really save lives.

In a year in the Eastern District, police have to respond to over 6,300 "911 hang-ups." That's over 5 percent of all calls. Police have better things to do. Here's how probably 6,299 of them went:

[Cop knocks on door]

"Did you call 911?"

[indignantly] "No!”

"Well somebody did."

"I didn't!"

"Do you have kids"

"Yeah."

"Well tell them to stop playing with the phone."

"My baby wasn't playing the phone!"

"Ok. Whatever. Good bye."

[door slams]

For that, we don't have officers walking the beat.

911 Is a Joke

Rapid response doesn't work for police. I've published an article in Law Enforcement Executive Forum saying as much. It's also a chapter in my book. I was reminded of the futility of 911 yesterday when I came across an old man who had fallen down and cracked his head open here where I'm visiting my parents in Santa Monica, California.

I really don't remember my medical first responder training from 8 years ago. But I still figure I'm better in such situations than most people. At least I can stay calm and not do anything incredibly stupid. Luckily, for the both me and the bleeding man, an off-duty firefighter was there who actually knew what he was doing (apply pressure to stop the bleeding and give the guy some basic tests to make sure he was with it).

I fished the man's wallet from his pocket to look for any medical warnings and check for ID (that's the cop in me). Then there wasn't much for me to do except watch the scene and wait for a cop or paramedic to turn the wallet over to (it would have been a little difficult for me to put the wallet back in his pocket and I didn't want to bother the guy examining him... no, I didn't take anything, but I couldn't help but notice that his wallet was a lot thicker than mine).

One woman made us aware of her presence by deciding that the bleeding man's problem was the head wound, but the firefighter helping him. She yelled: "You way too much up in his face and need to step back and let the man breath! He can't get no air! Step back!" She meant it, too, and seemed about ready to set things straight.

Now that I'm a professor and not a cop, I'm so rarely reminded of complete, honest, and destructive stupidity! I was reminded how quickly a scene in the ghetto could get ugly with someone like her provoking a crowd. Luckily, this was a crowd on Santa Monica's 3rd St. Promenade. It isn't by a long stretch the hood. A few other people in the crowd kind of cut her off and blocked her out.

Meanwhile others were trying to call 911 from their cells phones and nobody could get through. The entire L.A. County system was either overloaded or down. Luckily, some public security person (I think their main job is to harass the homeless) could radio directly for paramedics. The guy had bled some, but he was going to be OK.

What surprised me wasn't that people couldn't get through to 911. I was surprised that they were surprised they couldn't get through. We've been sold on the wonders and necessity of rapid response. But anybody who needs it knows the truth: 911 is a joke, most of all for police.