Yeah, who am I gonna believe, some book you found or my own lying eyes? :rolleyes:
I was twenty years old in 1968 and I was no angel, believe me. Neither were most of my friends. The junior high school I attended had approximately 600 students and my high school had 1,600. I had plenty of experiences between 1958 and 1968 with teenagers of every background and anywhere from three years older than me to three years younger and everything in between, as well as experiences with them in various parts of the country and, a little later on, at several colleges around the country.
I know how people my age acted then, mmkay?
I know that the popular dodge around here is that if it doesn’t exist as printed data somewhere then it doesn’t exist at all, but it’s just as big a mistake to believe in everything you read as it is to ignore anything you haven’t. There is a reason why people learn from experience, and why books are only as good as the data they are based on, the political agenda behind them if any, and the analytical ability of the authors who interpret and present that data. And guess what? Most books are based on incomplete research and data, and frequently written to support their authors’ bias, so a book has to have some pretty heavyweight credentials before I accept unquestioningly whatever it has to say.
And besides, teenagers aren’t my primary gripe anyway. They just happened to be the most recent examples of the kind of behavior I’m talking about, probably because standards in this society have only recently degenerated far enough for them to be the first to feel that that kind of behavior in public is perfectly acceptable.
That is not enough information to get the help you need. What kind of emergency? How hurt is somebody? Is there ongoing danger? “Send me an ambulance at 123 Main St” is not going to get you an ambulance. More information is needed. The dispatcher needs to be able to figure out if they need to dispatch EMTs, paramedics, fire, police or any combination of these. Medics will not go in if there is a violent alltercation that is still happening so the police would have to go in first. Paramedics are needed depending on how serious it is. Fire might need to go if certain equipment is needed.
No it is not clear just because it was on 911. Even discounting the misdials and hangups there are plenty of people who dial it for mundane reasons that happen to be important to them but not emergencies.
He shouldn’t have hung up. But 911 isn’t some magical system by which the help you need gets there automatically because you wish it.
And maybe if the cop had bothered to ask instead of getting pissy about her language she would have been able to tell him. I see no reason other than orneriness to blame the girl for what happened.
That’s my point, though. The words considered vulgar were shifted - it’s not that people weren’t vulgar, they just used different words when they were.
I know the value you place on your personal experience, but i’d hope that even you would agree that you really can’t know whether girls didn’t use them outside of mixed company either. Unless you have something to confess to us, of course.
My point isn’t that the words we use now weren’t around then, but that they had different words to express themselves vulgarly. A person could say something as societally offensive as “shit” without saying “shit” specifically, and those words seem pretty tame and inoffensive (to an extent) now. If this was a more vulgar society, we should consider both those old words along with the new as vulgar.
That’s silly. I really mean no offense, but the population of the U.S. is in the hundreds of millions. You can’t generalise from the experiences of one person, there’s simply far too many people to do so. And again I mean no offense but i’m even less sure i’d be willing to generalise the entire population of the U.S. from a 50-40 year old memory of one person’s experiences.
I think actually the “popular dodge” is not to disbelieve your own story, but to disagree that it’s reasonable to generalise so hugely from it. I’m happy to accept your word for what happened to you. I’m not so happy to accept your word and declare that the entirety of American society of the time may be known and examined through you as a single source.
I mean, let me ask you this. If I told you what my high school years were like, would you assume that what I had to say was largely true for all British kids of the '90s?
Incorrect. 911 is a “magical” system by which you get the help you need. Even if you call it and hang up, the police will come. For all they know you called for help and then passed out, or you called for help and the person breaking into your house pulled the phone out of the wall, etc etc.
You (and others) can pick apart everything the girl said and did. You can guess what kind of person she is or if she’s got a smart mouth. You can say that she should have just cleaned up her mouth and asked nicely. You can do all of this as long as you want because the simple fact is that he failed to do his job and could have been the cause of a loss of life. No, this time he didn’t cause a death, but had she not complained who knows what could have happened?
I know good police officers who really are trying to help the public and do the best job they can. They probably get cursed at every single day. They ignore the language and do their jobs because they realize that if they are in a situation with the public, it’s an escalated situation and emotions run high. They don’t turn into Miss Manners to lecture people, scold them, and refuse to help them properly.
Look how easily he failed to do his job. He was manipulated (if you want to assign her blame) by a seventeen year old! He’s been on the force for over twenty years and he was so easily distracted by the word fuck that he put someone’s life in danger? That’s a pretty piss poor example of a police officer some of you people are defending.
Starving Artist – THE PLURAL OF ANECDOTE IS NOT DATA!!!. WE were not there, and the only site you have is, “my post.” Other peoples’ experiences have been far different.
And good god, man, my own experience in high school was not nearly the hellish wasteland you seem to be painting of life post-sixties…and I graduated in 1996. Oh but hey, we used the f-word.
“Send me an ambulance at 123 Main St” is good enough to turn the wheels. We’ll find out what the issue is on the phone or when we get there and then someone will tell the medics and they can be waiting outside, but in any system worth a damn, if you have a good address and what kind of help is needed, you get the responders rolling immediately. No delays for further natures, no counselling someone for being a rude bitch, no sleeping, no bantering no bullshit. 9-1-1 isn’t a magical system, but it’s one we’ve had almost 40 years to perfect.
I agree with the idea that society has denegrated socially. It grates on my nerves like nobody’s business. That said, so what? These are the cards we’re dealt, and by god, if someone calls 9-1-1, there had better be a damn good reason like an unconfirmed address or a cell with an open line that can’t be traced NOT to send responders within a minute of receiving the call. This is 2009. Delays in response are not only unnecessary, but potentially deadly. If this man fell and the caller did nothing BUT swear, as long as you have an address that’s good, you send, send, send. THEN ask questions. This, even though it’s 6 months old, is bullshit of the highest order and that moron of a Sgt should no longer have a job.
I don’t care how things used to be, I’m sure they were great, hell, they were great when I was a kid, too. Things change, and the earliest adopters to the changes in society are and need to continue to be emergency responders.
Bottom line, the cop was wrong, wrong, wrong. He’s lucky as hell nothing truly bad happened. You don’t HANG UP on someone who’s called 9-1-1, especially someone requesting a damned ambulance. No sir, the girl was a rude little twat, but the cop put her fathers life in further danger. HE and that department are the perpetrators of the wrong.
I can;t believe it is rare for people calling 911 to swear.
Plus the cop flat-out lied when he told the dispatcher that he couldn’t get thru the caller’s comments to get the details. He started lecturing her - if he had said “What is the emergency?” instead of talking down to her or hanging up on her, he could have had the details in a minute flat.
This is 911. You don’t get to hang up on a caller if they don’t say pretty please.
Yes, the girl said a lot of stupid stuff about suing, and swore. She is seventeen, and her father is lying on the floor after being released from the hospital and brain surgery. Shouldn’t the person supposedly trained in handling emergencies be able to redirect the conversation towards getting the details he is supposed to, and not lecturing a frantic teenager on her phone manners?
Come on.
I usually bend over backwards to try to give the po-pos the benefit of the doubt. But this is well over the line. It is unreasonable to expect people who call 911 to be at their rational best when they need an ambulance.
One of the things all emergency services types need to learn is, everyone reponds differently to stress and crisis. You learn to filter out the profanity and the babbling for scraps of what the hell lead to person on the ground getting there.
This cop blew it, bad, and after listening to the audio of him referring to the girl as “hostile” and being “unable to find out what the problem was”, I think the biggest favor this waste of carbon could have done us was to clock out, climb into a dumpster, and shoot himself in the head.
I am normally one of the biggest cop and or “system” apologists here. The only way I could ever see this as even marginally excusable behavior is if it was his first day as a cop, pointed at the phones, given no training whatsoever, after being told it was the crime tips hotline.
In my area, the 911 operators are required to have 1 year of feild experience before applying so you have some points of reference about what is going on at an emergency scene that you are trying to analyze over the phone.
The girl is a tool, yes I agree, so are alot of the people who call. Part of why the system is not mired in 2 year olds who burned their finger on a pop tart is that the 911 operators take the time to ask the right questions and determine the correct response. Even with good information 911 responses are often restricted to basic response until an official assessment of the scene by first in units justifies greater response.
Come on, do I have to breakdown everything for you? I stated “Actually, that much was made clear when she dialed 911.” Obviously there are prank calls and some people’s distorted views of what constitutes an emergency. That’s all irrelevant until such information is demonstrably true. Until that point, it is an emergency, for all practical purposes.
If for example she called a non urgent line, usually the first thing those people say is “hang up and dial 911” so the tracing system is able to do its thing. If for some reason that is not possible they need to collect some basic information and contact the dispatchers.
From the recording, it sounded like it. Typically the recording starts as soon as the call is received as opposed to being picked up by an operator, so in the you tube clip there’s a little background of the caller before the operator picks up. That means it’s a 911 call, referred 7 digits don’t typically have that feature on event recorders.
