I called once long ago just after college in Dallas when I discovered my roommate had killed himself. Once I mentioned the gun in his hand they were there in about 90 seconds. As in, screeching up in front of my door. Not bad for a giant apartment complex with dozens of alleys, parking lots and cookie cutter buildings everywhere.
Two really cute cops show up. 
(I swear, it wasn’t on purpose.)
I watched a pickup truck go from kind of smoking to four wheel fireball inside of maybe two minutes in the parking lot of the mall once. The 911 operator was a moron (I’m at the Woodfield Mall on the west side of Sears. No, Sears. Yes, the Mall…No, Sears) finally I got frustrated and told her I had things to go do if they didn’t care about a truck on fire. Saw a cop, flagged him down and pointed it out.
The truck was a burnt out shell by the time I was done shopping.
I live about two blocks from the OP, and I consider calling 911 about twice a week. Haven’t done it yet. For some reason, the 50-yard stretch of street directly below my window is a hot spot for people getting in screaming matches at 2am. Sometimes I’ll climb out of bed, open the window, stick my head out, and listen to the drama. It usually turns out to be drunk people arguing about taxis, but occasionally it’s a couple dramatically breaking up. And always gay men. Go figure.
Once I’m satisfied there’s no violence, I go back to bed.
I have actually called 911 twice in my life.
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I was a bank teller and we got robbed. All three tellers triggered the silent alarm, but all that does is turn on the camera and alert the central security office a thousand miles away. As soon as the robber left, we called 911. Our central security office called us about ten minutes later (when the place was already swarming with cops) to ask if we had accidentally triggered our alarm, and whether we wanted them to call the police for us.
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I was driving down the highway with two of my friends one afternoon. I was sitting in the back seat. We saw a pickup truck parked on the shoulder with a man and a woman standing in the bed. Right as we passed it, we saw the man punch the woman in the face and the woman drop into the bed. My buddy, driving, swerved off the road and screeched to a stop maybe 1000 feet down from the pickup. I called the cops and told them what we saw. As I was talking I saw the assailant walking towards us, obviously trying to look calm. In a maneuver hilariously funny in retrospect, my friend started driving away from him at about 2 mph. He kept coming, and the dispatcher advised us not to let him approach our car. Thanks lady. After about 30 seconds of low-speed cat-and-mouse, he realized he wouldn’t catch us. He turned and hopped the fence by the highway and walked off. The cops caught him about 3 minutes later.
I have called 911 a few times.
Most recently was last year, a cow-worker and myself were on our way back to the office after an all-nighter out doing field work. Some crazy lady was running around in morning rush hour traffic on the southbound freeway. We swerved to miss her (and immediately pulled off onto the shoulder), but the car behind us slammed on his brakes to avoid plowing into her, but still hit her, she hit the ground and bounced. I called 911 as we were pulling over to report her running around, but just as I was connected she got hit.
She couldn’t have been hurt “too bad” as she got up and tried to jump over the barricade into northbound freeway traffic. Somebody who had seen it happen going northbound had stopped and managed to restrain the crazy lady until the police arrived.
We gave our statements to the police as there were car accidents that resulted from people hitting their brakes.
She was obviously mentally disturbed, screaming she was just trying to hitchhike to L.A., but she was running around in traffic trying to get hit by a car.
Hopefully, she got the mental help she obviously needed.
The time before that was to report a car that caught on fire while at a traffic light.
I never thought of that before, but it’s probably why my work phone uses 8 to get outside.
Yes, actually. Even if we call you back and ask if everything is okay, we still send somebody out because somebody might be holding you at gunpoint and making you say everything is okay. So sorry MLS that the mean cop bothered you but it was for YOUR safety. If something had happened and nobody showed up you would have been PISSED.
I’ve never called 911, but i work as a 911 dispatcher and have taken lots of 911 calls.
BTW: it is not okay to call 911 to ask what time it is. sorry, that is not an emergency!
Someone I know called 911 repeatedly as home-invasion robbers climbed through their second-story window.
The cops came about an hour later.
You don’t want to live in the S.F. Bay Area.
Wow, that’s a bold statement. I lived there for 15 years - can you narrow down the particular Bay Area neighborhood to which you’re referring?
I’ve called 911 twice.
Once was when I hit a deer on my way home. I was shaken up, but otherwise okay. Dispatcher was really nice, asked if I was hurt and if the car was driveable. After we both determined that 1) I was most definitely okay, 2) the car was driveable, and 3) the deer was nowhere to be found, we decided to not send a car out, as it would take quite some time, being out in the country and all. (I was on a rural 4-lane divided highway about 5 miles from home.)
The other time I called was when I was driving home and got behind a car swerving like crazy. Closer inspection revealed 2 people in the front seat fighting - actually punching one another! As I was on the phone with dispatch and following the car, I realized that there was a child in the backseat. Made my heart lurch even more, you know? I kept following the car and giving the dispatcher the info on where we were - they finally pulled into the parking lot of the local community college. I did a loop through campus, and on my way out, the police pulled up to them. I told the dispatcher that the police were there, she thanked me, and I went home.
I’ve called 911 three times:
When I was 16, my father finally caught my mother in the act of cheating on him. He waited until she got home and then attacked her. He was choking her and I asked him to stop. He said he wouldn’t, so I warned him I was calling 911 and he should leave. He stopped choking her before she passed out and waited patiently on the front porch for the police. I’d have preferred letting him finish what he started, but I didn’t want him in jail.
When my father called me to ask for a ride to the hospital, he should have called 911 instead. When I got inside and saw what shape he was in, I called 911. The fucking dispatchers, despite knowing exactly where his house was – my mother had been a paramedic for years and they all knew her and where she had lived prior to the divorce – screwed things up and it took the ambulance 30 minutes to get there. It should have taken no more than 3 minutes. He died.
My daughter dated a boy who was a fucking moron, er, I mean football player. When she broke up with him, he didn’t grok and kept trying to “win her back.” When he finally figured out that she wasn’t interested, he told her via myspace messaging that he had just taken 30 vicodin and drank a beer. I called 911, since we only knew the boy’s cell phone number and they went and picked him up and pumped his stomach. His parents were mad at me over the ambulance bill. Did I mention they were downstairs while the boy was ODing? Yeh.
If it doesn’t seem to be an emergency, I will call the local number. I once called the local number because it looked like someone had been run over – since I could see several people on cell phones, I assumed someone had called 911, but just wanted to be sure. Local dispatch told me that yes, 911 had been called, but they were told it was just someone had fallen down, but help was on the way. I found out later that a 3 yo kid had climbed out of the family’s van door while it was driving down the road. The driver of the van (the kid’s mother) ran the child over – he was DOA. Very fucked up sitch.
Um…you wanted him to kill your mother? :eek:
Wait, I’m confused. Why did your father need an ambulance and then die–I thought it was your mother who got strangled? 
If you had ever met my mother, you would understand why she should have died. This is a woman who used to drop me off at a friend’s house so she could cheat on my father while he worked – knowing full well that her “friend” was raping me. That went on from the time I was 3 until he hanged himself in front of me when I was 5. So, uhm, yeh, I would have gladly let my father kill her, if he could have gotten away with it.
The second time was a different time – about 15 years after the first. He had a “massive aortic embolism” (aneurysm? whichever one means it burst) and basically bled to death.
Okay, you busted me. What I said is absolutely true, and it is in no way an exaggeration. However, it took place in Oakland. Oakland is part of the S.F. Bay Area. As you know, ordinarily, one would just say, “The East Bay” when speaking of Oakland. But the droves of people who decide to move to the “S.F. Bay Area” every year get to S.F., have heart attacks when they try to find a vacant place they can afford; then wind up in Oakland anyway, and act all shocked when they find they’re not in Kansas anymore. (no offense to Kansas. I meant in the W.O.O. sense.)
I didn’t mean to offend you, either. But I will say that the San Francisco of the 1980’s was a wonderful place to live, and the San Francisco of today is a sad and depressing contrast. If I say any more we’d likely get moved to GD or The Pit.
Ah, okay…didn’t realize they were two separate incidents.
Sorry you had to go through all of that…sounds like you and your family have been through some seriously tough times.
Called a few times -
When a little car in front of me hit a huge deer on a highway. Didn’t have a cellphone, so I sped to the local gas station and called it in. Unfortunately driver did not make it out.
When a drunk guy was positive I knew where “Mikey” was, and refused to stop pounding on my door, yelling, cussing. At 3 am.
When a car in front of me was managing to pinball across all three lanes of the freeway, speeding, and randomly hitting his brakes.
Most memorable was my stalker ex who “just wanted to talk”. He told me to go ahead and call the cops - he knew them all and they wouldn’t do anything. They also knew me via a relative in the department. He did not go quietly. Never heard from him again, so I’m thinking he also had a nice talkin’ to at the station.
Oh, I’m with you. I moved a few years ago from SF proper for pretty much the reasons you’re talking about. But, I never really felt unsafe there.
Thanks. It’s in the past, and thankfully, I have had no contact with that woman since the early 90’s. I have heard she is back in TN, which makes me a bit nervous that she will bump into me at some point (or worse, stalk me out – I learned about her being back in the state via my niece*). I have lived an interesting life thus far, and I choose to live in the now, not the past, and I know people who have had worse things happen.
I called 911 once when I drove up to my house after a long weekend away and saw the light in the front room go out. The police came and low-crawled through my house, but nothing was disturbed. I felt the lightbulb of the light I had left on and it was warm, but had blown out. The only thing I can figure is that it blew out at the very moment I drove up. The cops were nice enough at first, but then treated me a bit like an idiot when they didn’t find anything. Hey, who would have assumed that the light bulb blew, as opposed to someone inside turning it off?
I called 911 at about 3 in the afternoon last New Year’s Eve. You see, I was working downtown and they’d kicked us out early. There was hardly any traffic on the main street where I was waiting for a bus, so a kid decided it would be a good idea to skateboard on it, using the planters in the middle of the street as ramps. As he was doing this, he kept crossing an intersection which is normally pretty busy. Unfortunately, the bus arrived before the police did. The funny thing was, I’d been reading the Darwin Awards, and I was thinking I was about to witness one!
The other time I called 911 was when I was living in a tiny, ground floor, studio apartment in Hawaii. I awoke in the middle of the night to see a face looking in my kitchen window, which was about 6 feet off the ground and didn’t have any curtains. I sleepily remembered hearing my next-door neighbor talking to the police about a Peeping Tom the night before, so I rolled over and called 911. The police arrived, caught the guy, and let him know that if he ever turned up on the property again, he’d be arrested for trespassing. I don’t think they could charge him with anything else. The funny thing is, I wasn’t at all frightened, even after I woke up fully. I just wonder what he saw.