I’ve had to call 911 many times, mostly for auto accidents that I’ve witnessed. My former residence was at a bad intersection. Of the times, three stick out as being memorable.
I saw a hit and run accident at that intersection.
At my new house:
I had someone walk into my house in the middle of the night. My dogs weren’t very happy that he decided to visit, so they did a pretty good job of attacking him.* He ran down my hall, and locked himself in my computer room, and became unconsious and unresponsive on the floor. That was the night I found out I could go from being asleep, to getting the gun case unlocked, and having a loaded rifle in my hands in under a minute. It was an interesting eveing to say the least.
The high voltage feeder wires on my street shorted out after a storm, and were arcing all over the place.
The guy only suffered one dog bite, he passed out because he was either very drunk, or was using other substances.
Just once when a pole transformer blew and caught the neighbor’s yard on fire. It wasn’t a bad fire and I got it out with a garden hose before anyone showed up but I’ve heard enough bad stories that include the line “They should have called for help immediately,” so I called first. They showed up and made sure there weren’t any further problems; no one complained that I called them out on something minor.
I came of age before 911 services were widely available. :: puts on cranky old broad hat:: Shoot, when I was young, the ambulance was usually the hearse from the local undertaker in my hometown. I was into my thirties before getting a mobile phone, so at times when traveling, where we would now make a quick 911 on the cell, there might be miles to go before a phone was available. :: removes hat::
But I have placed a few:
domestic violence next door - gunshots fired
gunshots fired in the apartment upstairs*
came upon an accident on a deserted highway at 2 am - 2 of 3 survived
while giving chase to someone who had just snatched my purse
for an elderly neighbor when checking to find him close to a diabetic coma
I have also given instructions a few times for 911 to be called when acting as a first responder in various places that I’ve worked over the years.
*I’ve lived in a couple of dicy neighborhoods in my time.
I’ve never been put on hold. And the sheriff’s office in our county actually prefers that people use 911. They aparently don’t dispatch at all from non-911 numbers.
Many. many times. For a couple of years, I went through a stretch where I was either a witness to, or first person on the scene of, at least one car wreck a week.
I’ve also called for heart attacks, assaults and one burglary in progress.
One when I was in college and a crazy stalker broke my window.
One a few years back when I came home and my husband wasn’t here but his car was. I hit “redial” and got 911 and they told me he had been taken by the squad.
I called once when my dad was having something like a stroke, once when my mom had another medical issue, and once for myself when I was having chest pains/sweating/shortness of breath.
I’ve never had to report a crime in progress or an accident.
Several years ago I was staying in a hotel in Detroit. There was a locked door between my room and the next. Late at night I started hearing a commotion from the next room . . . lots of yelling, then the sound of someone being thrown against the door, then a male voice yelling, “I’ve got a gun.” That’s when I called 9-1-1. It turned out to be a guy with two twin hookers. He hadn’t realized they were hookers, and refused to pay them.
I called because I was pissed off and had no idea how to get ahold of the police any other way (no, wasn’t over chicken nuggets). I regret if a response to a real emergency was somehow delayed by her giving me the non-emergency number, but a 15 second call at 3:00 in the morning, I probably didn’t hurt much I now have the police non-emergency number programed in my cell phone.
I called 911 once after driving past a drunk bicyclist on a busy street. This was a long time ago, so I actually had to pull over and use a pay phone. They said they would send somebody in about 45 minutes, so I guess a drunk cyclist doesn’t qualify as an emergency after all.
One time to get rid of a boyfriend I had broken up with, who was pounding on my door and acting all stalker-ish. He wrote “I love you” in blood on my car’s windshield. :eek:
One time my husband (at the time) was having what we thought was a heart attack. He refused to go to the hospital. He was a bit of a macho tough guy. :rolleyes: I think that might have been the beginning symptoms of his congestive heart failure.
Once when I saw a woman who looked to be sleeping on the median of an eight lane heavy traffic road. I thought she might be sick or high.
Once when some kids were throwing large deadwood at cars out of a heavily wooded section of road. Scared the crap out of me when the car in front of me swerved out of the way of the log and it exploded on the road in front of me!
Once when my neighbor across the hall had a psychotic break in the middle of the night, smashed the mirror at the end of the hall with his bare hands, and attempted to break down my door and several of my neighbor’s doors. When I called 911, the operator said that they had already received a call from the manager who said the disturbance was coming from apartment 22. I said, “I AM apartment 22!”
The second time, a guy rammed his van into his girlfriend’s car and a took out a good chunk of the apartment building across the back alley. He then loudly began accusing her of cheating. He fled when the cops showed up, and nobody was hurt. This one was kind of funny, as about 50 people emerged from their apartments into the back alley to see what was going on.
Times I did NOT call the cops:
Literally a day after the first incident, a girl rammed her car into a dumpster five feet in front of me while I was taking out the trash. She stumbled out of her car sobbing and attempting to push the crumpled hood of her car back down. A minute later a man and another woman ran up, said, “You can’t keep doing this to yourself, Nora! You’re going to kill yourself!” and she said, “I don’t care! I don’t care!” They bundled her into the car and drove off. It all happened in the space of five minutes, so I didn’t call the police.
A policeman shot a bank robbery suspect to death a few yards from my apartment. I was woken by the gunshots and the ten million circling helicopters shining lights in my window. I didn’t call the cops because they were already there, obviously.
My next-door neighbor accidentally cut off the tip of her finger with gardening shears during my birthday party (11th or 12th, I think, I forget which).
When I was in high school, I woke up and came into the hallway to find my little sister’s babysitter/nanny (an older woman, from China) yelling “Call 911! Call 911!” Her boyfriend was lying on the floor. I ran and called 911 in a panic. It turned out she found out he was seeing some other woman and, in a fit of jealousy, was struggling with him to prevent him from leaving the house. The police officer gave her a lecture about false imprisonment.
Maybe 6 years back, at about 11 PM, we saw what looked like a fire on the roof of a neighboring apartment building. We called 911 and it turned out they were just welding something on the roof in the middle of the night.
Last Halloween, we were biking home when we saw a couple of guys walking down the street in our neighborhood and smashing people’s side-view mirrors off with drumsticks. They may have broken some windows, too, we weren’t sure. We stopped around the corner and called 911 but they were gone by the time we went back around the corner.
These are just the ones I can remember:[ul][]For police for major, car-stalling flooding at a major intersection.[]For police for wires and a utility pole down on the road at the same intersection.[]For police and ambulance when I witnessed a hit and run car accident that spun the victim’s car across 3 lanes of traffic and brought them to rest on the wrong side of the road.[]For police when there was a prowler around my neighbor’s house when he was away on vacation.[]For police when there was a prowler on my neighbors’ porch when they were on vacation.[]For police when there was a couple outside of a nightclub having a loud, aggressive fight that looked on the verge of violence.[]For police when there was a couple in a parked car across from my house, having a loud, aggressive fight that did turn violent.[]For police when there was a preschool-aged child left unattended in a parked monster-sized SUV at the same location (we had some neighbors for a while who had scuzzy friends) who was playing around in the driver’s seat (with the keys in the ignition) for more than 20 minutes.[]For police when there was a toddler left unattended in a carseat in a grocery store parking lot on a 35 degree day. With the engine running. :O[]For police when I saw a car that was subject of an Amber Alert.[]For police and ambulance for a family that had been hit-and-run and had a baby essentially trapped in the damaged car, and covered in glass. The mother had a broken leg and a panic attack and the father had a head injury.[]For an ambulance when a lady in a parking lot closed her car door on her foot, nearly severing it in the process. Ugly, scary scene.[]For an ambulance for my aunt, when she had a stroke.[]For an ambulance for my boss who didn’t have epilepsy and suddenly had a grande mal seizure.[]For an ambulance for an older man at my synagogue who had a heart attack. Sadly, he died despite CPR and one of those emergency defibrillator kits being used.[]For the fire department, when our furnace started making a horrible noise that left us in fear that our house was about to explode, then our CO2 detector started sounding. (The furnace did not explode, and they came out, turned off the gas and saved the day.)For police when my car was broken into. This call yielded the least useful response of all the calls I’ve ever made.[/ul]
Only once, a few years ago. My next door neighbor, an elderly widow, came banging on my door at 2 AM, crying. She was in her nightgown, and said people had broken into her house. I called 911. While waiting for the police, she began giving me details.
Uh oh.
The people who broke into her house were her daughters-in-law, wanting to steal all her money. The fogginess began to clear from my sleepy brain and I realized she’d really gone over the edge. By the time the police arrived, I felt awful and tried to apologize.
They were so nice – to me and to her. One said “Let’s go make sure they’re gone and your house is safe” and walked her back next door, while the other stayed and explained to me that she called them constantly. Apparently, their efforts at getting the attention of her sons and daughter, who all lived nearby but wanted to ignore her and her mental deterioration, were falling on deaf ears.
I talked to other neighbors and we started checking on her every day, but within a couple of weeks, she got into a car accident (yes, she kept driving in her impaired state) and her kids finally had to deal with her. She was placed in a nursing home after her car accident injuries were dealt with in the hospital, and she died a month or so later.
Sad stuff, but I gained an appreciation for the many things local police have to contend with.
While standing in the yard of the truck dealership where I worked, saw a pickup roll three times on the freeway offramp right in front of the yard. When I came back from making the call in the office, I was surprised to see the driver walking around and cursing while he picked up the rear bumper, which had been ripped off, and threw it in the bed of the truck. He must have been wearing his seatbelt, all right.
I had gotten home just a few minutes after my wife, and she came to the door freaked out because she had just noticed that the TV was gone, along with the stereo. While I was talking to 911 we realized that we had not gone upstairs to the workroom and that the perp might still be in the house. When the sheriff’s deputy arrived we went up and poked around. Nobody there, but all my camera gear was stacked in the middle of the room. Looked like the guy heard my wife get home, and skedaddled when my wife was getting stuff out of the freezer in the garage before coming inside.
An arsonist set fire to the house, and then rang the doorbell at 2:30am to say that he had been walking by and noticed smoke (we assume it was the guy; upon reflection his story was bogus, an opinion the fire captain agreed with). After I called 911, he stuck around to help with garden hosing the fire while waiting for the firetrucks to arrive. He disappeared when they did.
One night my atrial fibrillation transitioned into atrial flutter with one-to-one conduction. This required a trip to the ER, so the call was made and the EMTs arrived.
At least one place I lived, the cop cars all had “dial 911 for police: emergency and non-emergency” on them. I think this is more common in small towns.