The top photo has a “play” icon for me. On the desktop it autoplayed, but on the iPad, I believe I had to click on it.
Keep in mind I have no specific knowledge of that particular 9-1-1 center, but I do work in the industry…
It is a common occurrence in my experience that the recording is MUCH clearer than the live call. Almost a given. So I’ll give a tiny bit of slack on that point. After all playing a recording back often is through software that normalizes volume somewhat so a really quiet caller might sound loud and clear in the recording, and so on…
But many call processing software packages have a feature for immediate playback of recently completed calls. If there was any doubt then the 911 operator and his/her supervisor should be playing that back right away to glean every possible bit of detail that might help the responding personnel.
But the second call has rightly been identified as the critical error. There is absolutely no excuse for not passing along a vehicle description. Firing offence serious.
And having the phone number and vehicle make/model/color the 9-1-1 personnel should have cross referenced that information with vehicle registration and driver’s license records. That likely would have led to an exact license plate number as well as contact information for his family.
With a solid vehicle description police should not have left the scene until their were satisfied they had checked every single gold van on the grounds. Unfortunately from a map view it appears there were a few parking areas and perhaps no clear information about which one the vehicle was in.
As to specific location… there are three levels of precision… Basic 911 means the 9-1-1 center gets the call but absolutely no location information from the cell phone. E911 Phase 1 gets the location of the cell tower handling the call within 6 minutes of making the request. And E911 phase 2 gets the latitude and longitude of the call within 300 meters* within 6 minutes of making the request. None of those guarantee the exact location of a specific vehicle within a parking lot, and only Phase 2 is reasonably likely to get you to the right parking lot. Not sure which standard the call center handling these calls has.
*There could be better than these margins of error. Or not.
The animation is very helpful in understanding the accident. Thank you.
My experience with police dispatch is limited to working several years in campus security sharing the same radio dispatcher as the police. We could listen to their calls.
There were several dispatchers who should never have been hired and certainly should have been fired.
While it’s certainly possible that a number of technical glitches occurred in this one particular call, my money is on an incompetent operator trying to cover their ass.
That’s sad.
The original idea of 911 was that it was supposed to be the emergency number, for when crucial time might be lost if you took the time to dig the police or rescue squad numbers out of the phone book, or if you couldn’t even get to a phone book on account of your situation.
But 911 evolved fairly quickly into the default number for calling the police about anything. Gotta wonder how good an idea that was. If you had a different universal number for non-emergency calls, like 919 or something like that, you could have your best operators be the ones who picked up on 911.
And surely part of the job of a 911 operator as it exists now is sorting out actual emergency calls from a much larger quantity of more routine calls. There’d still be some of that if there were a universal number for non-emergency calls, but once it got established, most of that sorting would go away, and it would be easier for the 911 operators to treat every incoming call like an emergency.
**bolding **mine
<caller> But operator, it is an emergency! I cannot find my phone charger! Someone must have broken into my home to steal it even though there is absolutely no sign of forced entry! </caller>
Yes, in my experience most calls to 911 are not time critical true emergencies. A large majority.
Sigh.
Here we have 311. (It’s a general city services number, but is also advertised as the non-emergency police number.) That said, the cops are pretty liberal about who you should call 911 for around here. I go to community policing meetings and they basically have an attitude of “when in doubt, call 911.” Even stuff like noise complaints are supposed to go to 911 here. Cite on that one.
I was surprised to find that out, but there ya go.
The original news story said the police canvassed the school parking lot and could not find his vehicle but his dad found him 6 hours later. Has that story changed? The thing that made no sense to me was how the police had a description of the vehicle and it was there but no one could find him (this is a school, with a limited area, not a huge university or large city).
Read the article in post #11 or my description in post #17.