Have you ever called the cops?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
61

Some places only have 911 for any police response; Philly is like that.
My local is going that way as all dispatching is done from the 911 center, even if you call the non-emergency #, it has to go thru central dispatch, which is the same people answering the 911 phones.

Most EOC’s (Emergency Operations Centers) have two sides, the call takers who answer the 911 calls & the dispatchers who talk to the emergency services providers. As an EMT, we had to call the dispatcher at the beginning of our shift & occasionally for call info (incident # & times) to complete our reports, so lots of times.

Actual dialing of 911: a few accidents, a medical, & a vehicle theft in-progress. I’ve also radioed for emergency services a few times, including requesting PD to back us up & /or restrain a patient (certain types of people cannot refuse treatment/transport - that whole danger to yourself or others thing).

62

Thankfully, most people aren’t like you. I wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire. But I would call 911. :slight_smile:

  • If this gets me a warning, I’ll risk it.
63

Don’t worry. If we are getting backed up then calls are sorted by order of seriousness before sorting based on how long they have been waiting.

The call reporting domestic violence is always going to get dispatched before the call by a guy complaining about the neighbor’s dog pooping on his lawn. Doesn’t matter if the dog report has been waiting hours for an available officer. Of course human nature being what it is, the dog poop incident could develop into an actual physical confrontation and thus get its priority level boosted. :smack: Stoopid should hurt.

If there are two parking lot minor car accidents and only one available officer then, being equally serious, the report waiting longer gets dispatched first.

I actually “called” for police today. My housemates found a purse in the sea next to a dock and gave it to me to deal with as found property. I brought it into work and entered the details into the computer. When an officer was available I had him dispatched to our office to pick it up.

The purse could have sat on my desk all night but as it turns out an officer was available early in the shift. Low priority events like this will be dealt with only once all higher priority matters have been dispatched.

64

I noticed one of the most common calls listed in this thread was for livestock in the road. This is a real and serious road hazard and it is perfectly reasonable to call it in.

I’ve dealt with a few reports of car vs. cow/horse crashes and those can be bad even at relatively low speeds. The animal often dies, which is bad enough. But those crashes often result in the animal at least partially penetrating the windscreen resulting in serious injury to front seat passengers.

I’d much rather send an officer out when it is just a report of horses wandering in the road. Let them practice their cowboy roping skills until we can get the owner of the animals notified. We have a list of livestock owners and can usually figure out who to call based upon the location and type of livestock.

65

Well I hope someone never has a heart attack or gets hit by a car in front of you, since apparently saving the life of another person is “blindly reinforcing and perpetuating a broken system.” :rolleyes:

The actual facts of what happened are much different than the inaccurate account people always talk about. 38 people did not watch a woman get raped and stabbed to death and do nothing because they thought someone else would call. Around 12 people heard some kind of altercation occur, though they did not know/could not see what was actually happening, none of them saw the whole thing, and there were several calls made to police.

66

I came home late one night and saw someone run out of the neighbor’s yard with a flashlight and then run back into the shadows. It looked suspicious to me, so I called 911. It turned out the neighbor was chasing racoons out of his yard.

One of the oddest happened several years ago when a couple of guys got into a verbal pissing match in a local newsgroup. One of the guys was a nutbar racist, and the other guy was calling him on his use of the n-word. Nutbar insisted that he used this word around black people all the time, and they never objected. So they made an agreement with each other to meet at a BBQ joint in San Francisco, where Nutbar was to use the n-word to demonstrate that he could get away with it. Nutbar also said he was going to bring a firearm just in case. I called the San Francisco police non-emergency line and told them where and when this was supposed to happen.

The day after the event was supposed to take place, the two guys had different stories about what had happened. Nutbar said he showed up on time, but the restaurant was closed. The other guy said he showed up but that Nutbar didn’t. I suspect Nutbar was telling the truth - that the police warned the restaurant owner, and that he arranged to be closed at the time.

67

The bars I frequent are generally peaceful, but when a rare fight erupts it has always been my understanding that the owner doesn’t want the police involved. Pennsylvania’s archaic liquor control board can issue fines or pull the license of an establishment over things like fights.

The last bar fight I saw was handled by people grabbing the aggressor (I had a foot) and physically relocating him outside, where the owner told him he was not allowed back. Five minutes later the police arrived, saying they’d had a call about a fight. The bartender said she’d been working an hour and hadn’t seen anything. Everyone else backed her story up. Once they left, the owner bought a round.

68

Call the police? No, I call my Neo-Nazi gun-nut neighbors. But crime is very very rare here … [giggle]

69

Please remember that when blacks were dragged away and hanged, and Jews were put on trains, the police were complicit, if not the actual instigators. When the police are the enemy, I treat them as the enemy. And when I’m asked for my opinion, I make the call, regardless of what “people like you” think of “people like me”…

If I ever saw a person in mortal danger and I thought only the police could effect a rescue, I would call the cops. But I’ve never been witness to such an event, so my answer to the OP’s question is No.

70

Just a note that Kitty Genovese is a bad example to prove your point: many people called the police that night during her first run it with her attacker. Her murder happened in an area where people couldn’t observe her killing. Some people called the police and then assumed the issue had been resolved, when in fact she had been killed.

The book “Superfreakonomics” had a chapter on the murder and found several factual errors in the story about apathetic neighbors not wanting to get involved.

71

I’m aware that there were people who did call the police when Kitty Genovese was attacked. But that doesn’t change my point. There were also people who didn’t call and those are the people I have an issue with.

72

What about the post that immediately preceded yours? Justin Bailey’s post where he said he saw a guy on the street breaking into cars.

I’m guessing that’s the kind of thing you’d be willing to ignore (presumably as long as it was somebody else’s car being broken into). And then after you did nothing, you’d tell everyone that the police are to blame for the high crime rate in the neighbourhood. Not the criminals. Not the people like you that look the other way when you see crimes being committed. Just blame it on the police.

73

I have called the cops twice as an adult (plenty of times as a kid, I am looking at you Dad.)
The two times as an adult: visits from “the pizza guy.” I live in a rural area without street lights and I have no outside lights. At least four times, very late night or early morning, there would be a knock on the door. I live alone and only receive guests by appointment. I ask who it is, the man said “the pizza guy” in a really creepy way as if he had just then decided to say it as a way to get me to open the door. The first couple of times I just said wrong address. Each time I looked out, no car in my driveway or parked in the road, no head lights from a car parked anywhere near (WTF?) The next two times I called the police. We do not have police in my town so it was a trooper from some distant barracks. The troopers were very sweet and spent a lot of time walking around outside my house and looking in the woods for the bogeyman. :eek: My house is in the middle of woods far from other houses no house across the street. Also my house and street are well marked so you couldn’t confuse addresses.

74

Right.
How about calling the police for a dangerous road hazard? Or when you hear a domestic dispute? “Well hell, she’s just gonna get beat up a bit, the bitch likely deserved it anyway…”:rolleyes:

75

Yeah, the :eek: doesn’t even BEGIN to express how freaked out this post made me. Good move, CT_Damsel!

76

When I lived in Baltimore - all the time.
Where I lived we never watched COPS the TV show, my neighbors would come over and sit on my front porch and watch the live show.

Just a few incidents
The kid up the street , who wanted everybody to call him Satan, had an axe and was chopping up the park benches
Another kid was standing nude in the middle of the street screaming ‘fuck you’ at the top of his lungs and busting whatever bottles he could find in the middle of the street
A drunk passed out half in the road, I thought he might be dead until he moved. His legs were sticking out where they could get run over.
A guy dragging his gf out of the car and taking a wrecking bar to her head - you could see the blood from a block away
When my ex bf kicked in my door and tried to choke me
Car parked blocking my driveway and I had no idea who it belonged to
A big incident involving drug dealers throwing their gun in my yard and their attempts at getting it back which involved them trying to take a baseball bat to my dogs, well, it’s a long story. First and only time I ever cussed out a cop.

Once some kid in the neighborhood threw a bottle and broke my window, I didn’t have to call the cops because unknown to the brat, the cops were driving down the road and saw him do it.

Once I almost called the police on an altercation taking place almost in my back yard, but it turned out it was the police and they busted some drug dealers. It was amusing to see the same drug dealers who walked around like they owned the street crying and whining like babies when the police had the down on the ground in cuffs. Who knew they were such wimps?

Once when my truck got stolen, I found it before the police did
Twice when my house was burglarized

Outside my neighborhood
Various accidents, drunk drivers, some asshole who pulled a gun on my then bf, my sisters violent bf who beat her up, a broken water pipe in somebody’s front yard (it was the middle of the night and the water dept was closed), drunk passed out in the middle of the road (I almost ran over him), kids dropping bricks from an overpass, when a friend and I met up with a known rapist (we got away) while we were out hiking, once when I saw a house on fire as I was driving down a road

I should have called but didn’t the night some girl ran out in front of me after getting away from a rapist. I let her in my truck and drove her to where her friends were but she was adamant she didn’t want me to call the police or take her to the hospital. I should have insisted because the guy went on to rape and beat up other women before getting caught.

So lots of calls to the police
my life has never been boring

77

I’ve called a few times when I’ve seen a drunk driver on the road, once on a neighboring apartment for being too loud, too late, for too long.

78

I was at my parent’s house, with my dog in their fenced back yard.

I was in the basement and my mom called me upstairs. The fence gate was opened, said gate being on private property, and the dog was gone. I nearly went out of my mind, and started yelling the dog’s name. I didn’t care if I sounded crazy. Calming somewhat I went inside and called 911. This was trespassing at the least, as somewhat had to come onto private property. Maybe it was kids who wanted to play with him, I don’t know.

Surprisingly enough, the police arrived quickly. As the one officer began to take my statement(this was about 30 minutes after the dog went missing) someone from the neighborhood came around the corner with my dog on a leash. They must have heard the crazy woman screaming for her dog.

I thanked the police the best I knew how. One officer I recognized, as a few days earlier he’d been at the scene of an accident I was involved in. Another driver, without ID, insurance, or the ability to speak English, hit my car as he blew through a stop sign. But I didn’t call that in, a bystander did.

79

I called 911 once when the SUV on the highway ahead of us swerved randomly and flipped over into a ditch.

I’ve called for someone who might have just been drunk, but for all I knew had some serious mental health issues and a danger to himself and others.

I’ve called 911 when I witnessed a mugging.

I’ve called the police nonemergency number on various occasions when people on our block have had loud parties at all hours, and been transferred to the 911 operator even though I insisted it wasn’t an emergency.

I’ve called the police nonemergency number to report a stolen car that was stripped to the point that it was totally unidentifiable (no doors, hood, windows, trunk, or seats - just the body) and dumped across the street form my home, and been transferred to 911.

I called the nonemergency number long-distance once when I was on the phone with a friend who informed me that she was depressed and had just swallowed a bottle of her mom’s heart medication. That’s how I realized you can’t call 911 for the appropriate location from another area code.

I’ve called 911 when an unlicensed driver hit me head-on.

I called the nonemergency number when someone burglarized my apartment, and when someone burglarized my mom’s storage locker, and when someone smashed in my car windows.

I’m probably forgetting something.

Wow, this list makes my life sound more eventful than it really is!

80

I called the cops just a couple of weeks ago, actually.

We heard breaking glass next door and saw someone walking around the neighbor’s cars with what looked like a pipe. The neighbor normally has lights on his driveway at night and those were out. So we assumed that someone had smashed in car windows looking to take stuff.

When the cops got there, the neighbor was a little embarrassed to admit that the fluorescent light went out, he got pissed, threw it in his dumpster and beat the crap out of it. Thus explaining the appearance of a pipe, the lack of light and the breaking glass.

On the topic of petty calls to the cops… when my mother-in-law was in an assisted living home, she made several 911 calls on topics like “It’s been five minutes and they haven’t brought me a glass of water yet!” She believed that if she screamed and yelled enough that she’d be able to live on her own… though as someone with Parkinson’s who couldn’t even get herself to the bathroom, that was pure fantasy. The police eventually asked the assisted living home to take the phone out of her room.