Ask the 9-1-1 Operator...

I work in a 9-1-1 Emergency call center.

With Halle Berry soon to star as a 9-1-1 operator in a new movie, The Call, I think now is a good time to get your answers about 9-1-1 is in reality before Hollywood takes its turn on the topic.

Ask away.

What is the most harrowing call you’ve ever taken?

What is the most absurd? I’ve heard stories about old men calling and asking to have someone come cut their toenails; have you ever had anything like that?

Are you ever scared when you’re on a call with someone, or have you mastered staying calm?

From the trailer I saw for that movie, apparently Halle Berry’s character, once disconnected, CALLS BACK to the victim, which alerts an intruder to her location. Do you really do that as a matter of course?

We’re having a bit of a “thing” in Chicago at the moment, where the mayor is saying, “no, really, stop calling 911 when your kids won’t do their homework!” They’re trying to increase awareness of what is a 911-worthy “emergency” and what’s merely “urgent”. I saw a sign at the bus stop this week: “Shots fired? Call 911. Car hot-wired? Call 311.” (311 is our police non-emergency number.)

How would you (or do you) explain the difference to people? And do you think it’s different in a big city vs. a small town?

The one that stands out is a seemingly simple medical call about an allergic reaction to a bee sting. Patient had obvious breathing difficulty. Because the closer ambulances were already dealing with high priority calls the only option was to send the fire service to provide oxygen and an ambulance from further away. The ambulance was going to take about 30-35 minutes and I stayed on that call the whole time thinking this person might die from a bee sting. Patient survived.

I had a call with someone complaining about the smell of the neighbor’s garbage. In fairness several garbage trucks were down for maintenance and pick up is not happening on a normal schedule.

There have been several calls that take the general form of a parent wanting police to reinforce a parenting decision. (Tell my kid to 1) clean his room. 2) make his bed. 3)do his homework. 4) do his chores. etc…) If there is a domestic dispute as a result then we send the police to calm the situation, not to reinforce the parent’s decisions.

If the situation is not scary at times then you are not understanding what is going on. I know I am physically safe, but I am talking to people who may not be in a safe situation. I have to project a sort of serene calmness to keep the caller from panicking.

Is there a best time for non-emergency testing / queries? A few springs ago I found a bag of some oilfield compound in a ditch near my office, and 911 was apparently the number to report it. (Got 4 cop cars coming by to inspect it - must have been a slow day :wink: )

Often we need to call back. There is a rationale basis to the questions we ask and the order we ask them. If we do not have good location information then we might have to call the caller back if the line is disconnected.

For incidents that are in progress we try to keep the caller on the line until help arrives. This allows us to provide updates to responding officers that might affect how they handle the situation.

What call flabaggasted you the most? I once had to call 9-1-1 because a stranger and his dog were in the Big Boss’s car. It took me three tries to get the operator to understand the situation.

Have you ever heard disturbing background noise like gunshots, screaming, threats, etc? Have you been called to testify in a trial as to the particulars of a call you took?

The textbook answer is that 9-1-1 is for an immediate threat to life or property.

Kid won’t do his homework? Not an emergency.
Kid’s father is beating him because he won’t do his homework? Emergency.

Just because something is a police matter does not mean it is a 9-1-1 emergency.

Arrive home from work and see your place has been burglarized. You check inside to be sure no suspect is still there. Not an emergency.
Arrive home from work and see someone crawling out your window carrying your tv? Emergency.

There’s the rub. 9-1-1 is sold to the public much like a fast food franchise. Everyone knows that you call 9-1-1 for help. But with 9-1-1, exactly what is on the menu varies from location to location.

In a small jurisdiction the 9-1-1 center may take all calls for police, fire, medical and perhaps other civic complaints (pothole in road, trash not picked up, road not plowed of snow). In very small jurisdictions the 9-1-1 operators may serve double duty as front desk personnel at the police station.

In a more medium sized jurisdiction you are more likely to see a split, where 9-1-1 is a distinct entity and non-emergency calls are transferred to the appropriate agency or the caller is provided the phone number of the suitable agency.

In particularly large jurisdictions you are more likely to have separate stand-alone agencies like 311 for non-emergency reports.

For certain environmental issues like oil spills or hazard chemical spills, 9-1-1 is certainly the appropriate way to make a report.

If in your assessment there really is zero risk then a report through a non-emergency number would be appropriate.
For non-emergency testing we ask that we be notified on our non-emergency number prior to any test call on our emergency line. (Yes, 9-1-1 has a non-emergency phone number!) We deal with a few test calls on a routine basis, for example the Air Traffic Controller calls every day at the start of his shift just to be sure the phone lines are working. His call is usually around 5am, which is normally a good time.

A colleague answered a call from a person reporting someone was poisoning him by putting a cleaning compound in his crack pipe.

After being sure we understood what was being reported we treated it like any other call. Lighting a cleaning chemical on fire and inhaling the fumes deeply could be seriously damaging to someone’s health so an ambulance and police were warranted.
I had a caller who said, more or less, “Someone’s been shot. Send an ambulance to [address]. We don’t need the police, just an ambulance.”

Right… you might not need the police but the paramedics do!

We do sometimes have difficulties understanding callers with different accents, speech impediments, or who speak different languages. When people are stressed out during an emergency it can make it even harder to comprehend.

I have heard a lot of background noises like screaming, threats, sounds of a physical struggle, glass breaking, or someone kicking down a door. I have what sounded like gunshots, but given the totality of the circumstances I was fairly certain it was fireworks.

All of our calls and radio transmissions are recorded. Normally the court only needs a copy of the recording and an affidavit that the recording is a true copy. I have had to give a formal statement once. I’ve never been called to court to testify. My boss has gone to testify a couple times.

Why did it take two calls and 25 minutes for cops to arrive when I called to report that our upstairs neighbor was yelling that he was going to kill himself?

Not really your problem or fault I guess.

I cannot know the exact details in your circumstance. But here are some generalities.

When 9-1-1 takes your call, the details should be sent for dispatch. Sometimes things are a bit slow and all calls can be dispatched immediately. Unfortunately quite often all officers for a given area are engaged in calls for service and a queue of calls awaiting an available officer starts to build up.

Local policy would dictate how to prioritize the dispatch of any calls that are awaiting an available officer. Generally our office sets a priority level of a given call type but our staff have the ability to increase or decrease the priority level based upon specific information.

We then dispatch calls based first upon priority level and then based upon how long the call has been pending. There may be policies that dictate whether, and in what circumstances, a police officer can be diverted from one call to another. With higher priority calls it may be possible to request an officer from a neighboring jurisdiction assist by handling that call.

A threatened suicide would be a pretty high priority call in my jurisdiction. Any specific details might increase that priority level (Caller says he sees the subject pointing a gun at his head.)

Have you ever taken a call from a young child (under age nine or ten, I guess) calling on behalf of an incapacitated parent? Are calls by/about kids more difficult–or are any calls more emotionally difficult/painful than others?

Do you have on-call interpreters for different languages at all?

It has to be very weird, getting these tiny glimpses into people’s lives at some of their scariest moments… Has any call left you with an unsolved mystery that you still wonder about?

And thanks for the thread. What I do is so utterly nonessential to basic survival that I’m fascinated and awed by people who do life-and-death jobs.

What resources do you have available to you?
Late one Saturday night, a car went off an exit ramp from the freeway a quarter mile ahead of us too fast, running down the exit sign and nosing into a ditch. I called 911 as my husband pulled up the ramp and got out to check on the driver. As I gave the plate # to the operator (who pinpointed my location though I was calling from an out-of-town cell), my husband was telling the conscious but clearly drunk driver that help was on the way. Driver freaks out, saying, “Man, don’t call the law!” and proceeds to lurch his car out of the ditch, dragging pieces of the undercarriage and takes off up the exit.
I’m telling the dispatcher what I can see going on when my husband comes back. She asks, is the driver a young white male w/ a shaved head? My husband says, yes he is; the dispatcher had the driver license picture in front of her. She assured us the police would meet the man at his home in just a minute or two and we drove off.
She had access to GPS, the DMV and Licensing at least, I assume.

Have you ever had a call from someone having a stroke who couldn’t be understood?

I have had a few calls from kids.

In general, kids make great callers. They tend to answer the questions we ask and, perhaps because they may not truly understand the severity of the situation, they tend to not to become overly hysterical.

We try to provide simple guidance and we simplify questions for them. (For a kid: Is mommy able to talk? For an adult: Is she verbally responsive?)

Kids tend to follow instructions well. If I tell them to wait until they hear the siren and then step outside and wave at the ambulance then they will do it.
We have also had some bad calls involving kids. Any call where a child is seriously injured or dies is rough. It could be expected due to a serious illness or unexpected and due to an accident.

Yes. Absolutely. Some of our staff are fluent in languages other than English and our first choice would be to transfer a call in-house. Otherwise we have a list of interpreters to call upon. Many 9-1-1 centers subscribe to a language line service, and an interpreter is patched into the call.

On the caller’s end, often a friend or family member of the caller is able to interpret for them.

I have had callers who speak did not speak English but could speak Spanish, Tagalog, Polish, German, or Italian. There may have been other languages I’ve forgotten. Determining which language they speak can be half the battle.