Amen to that! There have been several times where I’ve needed to call the police but it was either criminal but not emergency (car broken into) or paperwork related (copy of accident report). It was a pain in the ass to try and figure out what number to call - the phone number has all these different police districts and other random departments, and if you are not at home or stranded roadside there’s no easy way to get the right number. There should be a well publicized non-emergency number that automatically gets routed to the proper non emergency police line at the closest district.
Wow. No I haven’t seen that before. Pretty scary stuff. Did they not… Wouldn’t they… ugh never mind. I don’t think there’s any explanation which would suffice really.
Chowder I take calls for that area but I live in another part of Manchester, and my main area when I’m dispatching officers is Stockport.
Two more gems that cropped up overnight:
Dad phones up because his 2 year old kid was locked in the car, and the keys were locked inside. We go through ‘does anyone have a spare key’ and ‘are you a member of a breakdown company’. They do not and he is not.
P:Well you’ll have to break the window then.
D: I don’t want to do that. I’ll have to pay to get it fixed.
P: Yes, probably.
D: Send the police to get him out.
P: All we would do is break the window, and it would take us longer to get there. The quickest way to get the child out is to break it yourself.
D: But then I’ll have to pay! Don’t you have some tools to open the door?
P: No.
D: Then the police can break the window. That way they will pay for it.
P: No they wont. Break the window. Your child is more important than a pane of glass.
D: But I’ll have to pay.
If your two year old was trapped inside a car, would you even hesitate? I can understand maybe calling us first, on the offchance we have a magical solution (the kid wasn’t in any distress at this point) but valuing the glass more than the kid? Scary.
But, another story in praise of the children. Two boys come to the outside of a police station (which happened to be closed because not all our stations are 24hours) and picked up the direct phone. They told me there was a woman in the park who was drunk and driving a car with two little kids in it. The fact that they’d walked to the police station and had a reasonable description clued me in that it wasn’t a hoax. We found the woman eventually, and she did appear drunk, barely with it at all. She was breathalysed but it came out negative. Turns out she’s a diabetic and her blood sugar was dangerously low. The park was pretty much deserted, and the two kids she had were both under 3 and strapped into child seats so they couldn’t have got help if she collapsed. There’s a good chance those kids saved her life.
Yeah, if the kid wasn’t in distress, I’d probably wait for the cops. Here in the states, the police carry a neat little tool called a slim jim and they are very adept at getting into the car quickly. I think they must be getting used to getting calls like that, child in car or not.
Reminds me of the time my daughter (she was around 3 at the time) locked me out on our 2nd story deck. I spent a good half hour trying to cajole her into letting back in as she stood there on the other side of the glass door laughing at me. I had no phone with me and the apartment complex was empty in the middle of the day. Don’t know how long I would have had to wait for someone to come by if she hadn’t finally decided to unlock the door and let me back in.
Relevant to this thread, there was a thing on the BBC last night about ridiculous calls made to (mostly volunteer) hill rescue teams.
Some of them are along the lines of “I’ve climbed most of the way up, but now I’m tired and fed up” or “I might be lost, I can’t be bothered to look at my map”.
But the best was a couple who called for a helicopter to ‘rescue’ them - because they were late for a dinner party.
That deserves a kick in the gnads.
Yep, and there’s other locally-applicable options, such as mountain or cave rescue.