I would image it was in response to a request for information, that gave the number for the local office or agent involved. There was a small Federal investigation in my area where an FBI hotline was set up, part of a regional crack down.
When I am out of town, how would I know the local police number? Even non-emergancy responses must be routed through dispatch, so calling the dispatchers directly at 911 for vehicle incidents, etc, would seem to just save everyone’s time.
Was it a different jtur88 who posted “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.”?
New Jersey does have a statute against frivolously calling 911 in a non-emergency. It states
Of course the word “knowingly” is the key word. There has to be intent. I have only seen this statute used when someone raises a false alarm using 911 or repeated frivolous calls after being warned.
In the town I work in they have the ability to drop your call down to the non-emergency number. So if you call and they deem your call to not need immediate response and they are getting hammered with emergencies they will transfer you to the non-emergency line and put you on hold until they get to you.
In my personal life I’ve had to call a couple of times. A few car accidents that happened in front of me. One that I was involved in.
The problem is–as Al Jaffee once said, The signs don’t apply to illiterates.
Three times that I remember: once when I was in high school and some woman was running down the street screaming for us to call 911 because someone was trying to kill her and/or her son (this was true. There was some deranged freak who lived a couple blocks over who tried to run over her kid with his car. Saw the tire tracks in the front lawn and everything.)
Second time was a neighbor three doors down who had some pissed off and drunk-off-his-ass contractor come demanding money or something, and there was a really bad version of a street fight developing in the street. By “bad” I mean completely uncoordinated, uneventful, no punches landed but a bunch of kung-fu movie type posturing. I eventually lost my patience and got out there to scream at them and engaged the drunken fellow in conversation until the cops arrives like a half hour later.
Third time was driving down a street in the West Side of Chicago when I saw a guy with the biggest gun I’ve ever seen ditch it in a dumpster. I’m not kidding. This was a bright silver gun that looked like a Desert Eagle from a distance (I really can’t imagine that it was), but it was clearly a gun. I noticed him because there was a large group of people hanging out on a corner and he was just slightly apart from the crowd, disengaged from them and acting a bit out of place. I was just looking at him, and I saw him slowly approach the dumpster, pull a big silver pistol from under his shirt, and casually dumped it in there and walked away. I had to reanalyze what I thought I had just seen, but I’m damned sure I saw what I saw, so I called 911 one or two minutes later, after the stoplight turned green.
But lets not forget John 4:13.
How could I? He still owes me 20 bucks.
That’s bullshit. What felony’s do you imagine people commit on a day to day basis?
Cheers!
The answer to your question is “That is why they put all those numbers in the front of the phone book if not on the cover” but since pay phones and even phone books are becoming a thing of the past ----------
I’m not busting your chops but we managed to survive and get help as needed “out of town or on vacation” long before 911 came along. Doubting we were all that much smarter, the old system must have worked on some level.
It (911) does save time and I’m sure in the end some lives. But to those of us “of a certain age” it does still seem odd and I know people who have not called 911 when they really should have. A neighbor found a handgun in his yard and just rapped it up good and threw it in the garbage. Was there a body on that gun? Had it been used in a crime? We’ll never know. To him it clearly wasn’t an emergency and he still had that “911=emergency” mentality. I know even personally I’m less likely than I was to report gunshots a block away or things like that. But as “we” die off things will get better. At least until the replacement for 911 comes along.
Does “0” not work anymore? Serious question.
Perhaps I didn’t make it as clear as I could have, but I was mostly referring to vehicle accidents when out town. Just a brief search seems to show that police now a days expect any urgent request for assistance to be routed through 911.
I am really only referring to car accidents where one is stranded by the road, and contacting the operator to get the non-emergency line would be onerous on both you and the cops (who must contact dispatch anyways). Contacting the operator or looking through the phone book should be done for requests for information, or to report suspicious, but not immediately dangerous behavior, even when out of town.
Examples: [ul]
[li]Huntsville, NC[/li][*]Houston Car Guide[/ul]
Don’t think this has been mentioned yet but we’ve called 911 for medical emergencies, heart attack etc.
My most memorable call to 911 was one late night when I was driving my friends home from a night out. We were driving across a long bridge, and I saw two idiot teenagers decide they were going to run up the yellow line down the middle. I of course honked my horn and flashed my lights, mostly signally my disapproval of their antics. We were all in our early twenties ourselves.
The lead runner then flagged me town, and started banging on my window, urgently asking to be let in. He was in fact a large, muscular black man in his late twenties, banging asking to be let in, saying, “He’s going to kill me! He’s going to kill me!”
I was about to floor it off the bridge when directly in front of us appeared out of the dewy mist this tall, skin and bone shell of a human being, matted dreadlocks, and two soulless voids in lieu of eyes.
I spend around him and parked at the foot of the bridge. I told my passenger to call the cops, and I watched intently in my rear view mirror, as the first man hopped over the guardrail to the sidewalk, and “Murder Eyes” stood on the bridge deck just below. Whenever he’d try to climb over, I’d smash my horn.
But a minute later, a minute that lasted an hour, a van pulled out of a nearby side street, and whisked the second man over the bridge and back into the city. Another minute later, the small town police on our side, whose office was but a half mile up the street, arrived, and I reluctantly rolled down my window to shake the first man’s hand, and confirm to the cop that we had called 911.
We then drove home hoping to never do that again!
You have a point but it brings up where the holes in the 911 system can offer problems. Who is to say that town or stretch of road is even covered? And what happens when you are in one 911 zone but your cell tower is in another? Don’t get me wrong; 911 is a good system. But it doesn’t replace a smart and calm caller making good decisions. Those seem to be rare these days from what folks down the dispatch center say.
And there is more the issue. In Pittsburgh and the surrounding county they expect EVERY call to be routed through 911. If you want to see a cop, fireman or medic – if you even THINK you want to see one of the above – call 911. That isn’t the case everywhere and that difference can get you in trouble and cause some confusion in the system. Here a “barking dog” is a perfectly valid reason for dialing 911, in parts of other states I’ve visited it will get you a fine and/or community service.
Ages ago I offered a SDMB-inspired slogan for 911 that could be used across the country ------- “911 - your mileage may vary” 
That has been my “majority reason” for dialing 911. Older parents and a poor appreciation for the words “sounds good to me” have lead to that.
That actually happened to me once. The dispatcher simply transferred me to the appropriate jurisdiction’s dispatch. 
Or worse, local news coverage! :smack: This is probably something that should be standardized nationwide. I would imagine, however, that even in Pittsburgh, there is a non-emergency number for records or to follow up (cases where you don’t expect to see a cop, except maybe by appointment in several days time).
I used to work in rental property management, which included managing a rooming house full of crackheads. And the job itself was located in a building on a busy intersection with lots of traffic accidents.
The cops knew me by name.
Only twice did I have to call them about activities in the office. A co-worker freaked out, got violent and refused to leave, and a total stranger and his dog broke into one of our cars and refused to leave. The latter incident had to be explained to the 911 operator three times before she got it right.
I’m not clear what actually happened. Also, why did you mention the one guy was black? What did that have to do with the story?
The only time I actually called 911 was when I heard a lot of yelling and banging outside one night, looked out, and saw a strange young man screaming curses, banging with his fists, and kicking my neighbour’s door.
My neighbour is a single woman, divorced and in her 50s, and we are not very close … we don’t talk much. I had never seen this man before, it was not her ex husband. I called the cops and they came quickly, grabbed him without resistance, cuffed him, and took him away, still cursing. They identified themselves and my neigbour opened her door. She said she had never seen this man before, had no idea who he was. She was very shaken and in fact, had been too terrified to call the cops herself - so scared she had literally frozen.
We never heard anything more about this incident and to this day do not know why this man was attacking her door. I assume mental illness.