This morning someone was pounding on my door at 5AM. Before answering the door I wanted a phone in my hand, but soon discovered that none of my land-line phones were working.
With cell phone in-hand, (and a visual ID of cops out front), I answered the door. The cops explained they were responding to a 911 hang-up call from our address. I told them something was wrong with our phones and apparently they (the phones) had dialed 911 by themselves. Between that and seeing that my wife and I were alive and healthy and not under any apparent duress (except for about six pounds of adrenalin), this satisfied them and they left.
No, I did not get any sleep after that. 10AM now, and I think I’m still shaking a little bit.
So now, some questions:
-why would my phones have dialed 911 and then hung up? (I assume it wasn’t actually the phones in my house, but some problem further up the line) Is this purely random, or is there some sort of failsafe mechanism that deliberately does this?
-The cops pounded and rang the doorbell and pounded and pounded, apparently knowing that it might take us a few minutes to wake up and get our shit together. If we had not answered within a reasonable amount of time, would they have kicked the door in?
-Hypothetically, if all of this had taken place while we were out of town, and if they had kicked the door in to verify that nothing awful was happening, what would happen after that? Would they secure our house afterward until we returned home? Who would pay for the busted door?
(1) No idea.
(2) No. A 911 hang up might justify a knock on the door, but it doesn’t justify a forceable entry standing alone.
(3) You would. Or your homeowner’s insurance provider. If they’d kicked in a door at the wrong house, then the municipality or county would most likely pay for repairs.
Do you have an old cordless phone (not cell, cordless), the battery of which might have died recently (not discharged, completely died)?
I once had first responders come to my house because they received a 911 call from my phone number. (I was at work, but my next door neighbor was able to assure them that if my car wasn’t there, nobody was home. So they didn’t kick the doors in. I found out about it when I checked my answering machine from the office and found two messages, one from the responders, and one from the neighbor).
None of us had any idea what had happened, until…
Years later, I had a boss who did volunteer police support work. I happened to mention the incident to him. He told me that some early cordless phones automatically called 911 just as the handset battery was breathing its last.
My mother had recently moved out of her house into assisted living, and I had inherited her old cordless phone. It was plugged into an extension line in a room I rarely used.
I find it really hard to believe that a phone manufacturer would purposely program a phone to dial 911 because of a low battery. What the hell is the point in that?
ETA: Well shit. Apparently it’s true.
Have you noticed anything else weird happening around your home lately? Things being moved, things being misplaced and then reappearing, half eaten pickles in the jar, etc?
The bolded part was my reaction too, pretty much word for word. But the snopes link (as pointed out by Doug K above) explains what happened - a million monkeys dialing 911 occasionally. The link also states that they fixed the problem in 1991. Makes perfect sense in my case - I bought my mom’s cordless phone for her in 1986.
The snopes link reminded me of another oddity that the Washington Post wrote about a few decades ago: a woman was getting anonymous hangup calls every six hours (midnight, 6AM, noon, 6PM) like clockwork. This was before it was universally easy to trace calls, so it took a while to find the cause, during which the woman worried over what sure sounded like a weird, if punctual, stalker.
It eventually was learned that the woman’s phone (an 800 line for her business) had years before been assigned to a company that built and maintained remote, hard to access heating systems. When a problem occurred on one of their deployed systems (low fuel, equipment failure) the system automatically called the trouble line to report the problem. The company either went out of business or abandoned the phone monitoring, and the number was later reassigned to the woman. And one still-deployed system kept sending out its misunderstood trouble call.
We have a business located next to our house. They have a VOIP internet phone system, but no security or alarm system. One Sunday morning (thankfully not at 5AM) a cop shows up at our door and says the closed business dialed 911. Nobody was in the building to make such a call and, as I said, there is no alarm system to dial out either. We called the business owner and they arrived and let the cops look through the building. Nobody can figure out how the phone system called 911. The cops said “it happens occasionally” and they have no idea how or why.
This reminds me of a strange story that happened to my sister last year. I visited her house, and she mentioned that she wanted to get a new front door, and we talked about how she needed to get a new TV to replace her first-generation projection HDTV.
About two weeks later, her house got broken into. The thieves kicked in her front door, and stole the TV but took nothing else. She was not too upset about it, since these were the two things she wanted to replace anyway.
But the police asked her if she wanted them to dust around her house for fingerprints, and she said “sure.”
They got the fingerprint dust all over her carpet in every room, and the stains could not be removed. Apparently fingerprint dust is really sticky. So it cost her thousands of dollars to replace the carpet throughout her house. I think insurance helped, but the police didn’t.
This happened to us when my daughter was smaller–she got hold of the phone and started pressing buttons. We didn’t realize it but she’d dialed 911. About four hours later the cops showed up–they have to respond to every call, apparently. In my case there was no emergency, but how could they be so sure it was okay to wait? What if there had been a stroke victim? I guess maybe the operator could have heard my daughter’s baby talk and one of us saying “give me the phone” or something…
The call was probably placed from your phone(s) but it could have originated from your service provider. Your land line is assigned an ANI which is used for billing purposes and to identify your calls to the far end.
ANI (Automatic Number Identification) is a telecommunications feature that provides the phone call recipient with the caller’s phone number. The technology and method used to provide this information is determined by the service provider. The service is often provided by sending the DTMF (digital tone multi frequency) tones along with the call.
9-1-1 received a call with your assigned ANI and police were able to locate your address from the 9-1-1 or service provider software.
Buy a scanner, listen to how many “pocket dialed” or Child dialed or “I was trying to call India” calls they get every day, if all they did was respond to phantom 911 calls as priority 1 calls everytime they wouldn’t have time to respond to anything else.
I work in a 9-1-1 center…
Pocket dials, Butt dials, babies playing with a phone, and other assorted unintentional calls make up a majority of all emergency line calls we receive. Really!
Our stats may be somewhat above the numbers at other centers, but not to an extreme. Our area does have a lot of legitimate phone numbers that begin with 9-1 so it only take hitting that 1 key twice to make an unintentional call.
How such unintentional calls are handled varies a bit according to what is heard, what information is available to the operator, and local policy. Some police departments still dispatch officers if the 9-1-1 operator is not able to re-establish contact and verify it was an unintentional call. Some departments have given up on that unless some sign of distress is heard. There are simply too many calls.
And some of these calls are from malfunctioning machines. The switchboard at one area bank occasionally starts deluging us with calls from multiple lines for no apparent reason. And I remember a pay phone that was damaged in a storm and repeatedly dialed 9-1-1 for hours - hundreds of false dials. There things happen.
I’ve not been able to prove it, but the urban legend in the industry is that some cell phones will dial 9-1-1 if any key is pushed and held long enough, even if the keypad is locked.
A friend of mine was an IT admin who was involved in the VOIP rollout at his place of work. He said that there was a setting for completing a call to 911 if 91 and nothing else was keyed.
Of course, many people will first press 9 for an outside line, then 1 for the area code prefix, then look around… Now where did I put that number?..
When they heard it start to ring, they’d quickly hang up before the call taker could answer.
Cue the blue & reds!
Many times the phone is programmed (either by the manufacturer, the user, or a helpful friend/relative) so that the first speed dial location contains “911”. That is one of the reasons a lot of these phones dial 911 when they are failing. Other times it is the user pressing the wrong speed dial button and hanging up before [they think] the call has completed. Since 911 is only 3 digits, dialing and completing the call happens in less time than a regular 7-digit (or often longer) number. Some of the users may forget they’ve done this by the time it takes the emergency services to arrive.