This. Is. AWESOME!!! Thanks! I now have Google in my phone list. 
A tendency to overreact you think?
Overreact? 
They’ve done that in NC for years. I’ve never known anyone who’s had their plate or sticker stolen. (Doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen, but at least it hasn’t in my circle of acquaintances.) The numbers are tiny, but big enough for the cop to see as s/he saunters up to the car after pulling you over.
Someone here once said they put their plate on with four different types of screws: flathead, Phillips, and two types of allen screws. I have to get new plates for my new car this week. I’m thinking about using that method to screw it on.
Calling 911 in a case like this isn’t that big a deal people. If they are not busy the dispatcher will take the information and send a car. If there are emergencies going on all they have to do is hit a button and it gets dropped to a non-emergency line. This was an actual call for the police. There are people who call 911 for directions and worse.
Way back when I lived in Ohio, we once needed to call the township fire marshal to get a burn permit to remove some debris and underbrush. We called the non-emergency number and answering machine said to call 911 for any service requests. Called 911, and started with “This is not an emergency…” No problem at all. That township simply routed all calls through 911, who would then redirect to the appropriate extension. I guess it simplified their call management to have it centralized in one place.
Yeah, that happened to me some years back when I had a car stolen. While it was a bit of an emergency personally, you know, 'cause it screwed with me getting to work, it didn’t require absolutely immediate assistance; no one’s life was in danger, and it’s not like I saw the car get stolen, so there was no question of hot pursuit or anything. I just needed someone to come out within the next hour or two so that I could file a report. So I looked up the local precinct number and called that. The cop who answered seemed incredulous that I was calling that number rather than 911, and basically said “if your car getting stolen isn’t an emergency, then what is?”. I kinda wanted to say “something that’s an actual life or death matter?” but didn’t. So then I ended up calling 911 after all.
Several years ago the Washinton DC plates of my car were stolen I went home to Estes Park, Colorado for the summer. The police were not particularly suprised to get the phone call. There had seen a rash of these thefts and they thought they had a collector going. They figured he had about 45 states and that DC must have been a bit of a coup. It was a huge pain to fix long distance and cost me about 300$ I didn’t have at the time. I hope there is a special place in hell for griefers.
I have a friend who is a 911 dispatcher and he told me one time this old lady called 911 to ask how to cook broccoli. Apparently there are quite a few people who feel 911 is their own personal SDMB.
There are several bars over here that have license plates from the US and Canada all over the walls. Maybe the thief was coming here.
Yep, it replaced dialing ‘Information’ and asking just about any question. That’s part of the reason the phone companies changed from answering it as “Information” to “Directory Assistance” – trying to make it clear that all they gave was phone numbers, not general information.
See, this sort of thing is why I think people get confused and call 911 needlessly. When my car was stolen, same situation as you, I called the non-emergency number. Except the police here don’t answer the non-emergency phone before 9:00 a.m. I figured I had to talk to someone, so I called 911, said my car was stolen, and the operator sighed like I was an idiot, First Class, and transferred me to the non-emergency number…where someone picked up! What the hell??
Many phone systems have different rings for an outside call and an internal one (and transferred calls are internal). And often people will respond differently – outside calls will not be answered until the office opening time, but an internal call will be answered whenever anyone’s there to answer. That’s probably what happened to you.
I don’t understand the stress about ‘unneeded’ calls to 911.
Here in Minneapolis, the official instruction is to call 911 whenever you want a police officer/firefighter/EMT to come out to your location. And if you’re not sure, call 911. They don’t want calls delayed while people try to figure out which number to dial. The system is set so it’s a trivial task for the operators to transfer a call to a non-emergency number, and they are quite used to doing that many times a day. In fact, the operator who treated you as a idiot for calling could get a reprimand here.
No idea if it is this way where you are but with our 911 system the dispatcher hits a button and it drops to a nonemergency number. Then that same dispatcher will probably answer the other line. It just frees up the 911 line(there are more than one but they like to keep all of them open if they can).
I had my xxx-xxx tag stolen and replaced by the thief with a tag that he had stolen 100 miles away. I called the cops and they took a theft report, also indicating on the form that there was a tag yyy-yyy recovered. I immediately went to the DMV and got a new tag.
Several days later while I was at work in my local government office I received a phone call from the police dispatcher asking for me and advising that a car with my tag was being chased at high speed in the same town. She was surprised, i guess, that I was in my office and not in the chase. I told her that the tag had been stolen and reported as same. She said that the report says it was recovered. I pointed out to her that it was a duh different tag that had been duh recovered. “Oh”.
Anyway, the chase involved a sheriff deputy car overturning and a deputy being severely injured. The perp got away temporarily but was soon caught.
That evening or the next evening (30 years or so ago), I was at home watching the evening news and saw a report about the perp having been jailed and that they were looking for his accomplice, Ignatz I. Ignatz!!!, right ON THE FRIGGING TV NEWS.
Well, needless to say, I had to call my friend and cow-orker (same municipality) the police chief and discuss my dilemma. He suggested that I go down to the sheriff department and “fess up”, er, explain the snafu. Well, I stopped first at the tv station that aired the report and talked with another friend, the news director, and he told the chief reporter to issue a retraction, which they did at least twice the next day, apologizing and explaining that I was a victim, not a perp.
I then went to the sheriff’s jail and was shown the 18-year-old guy from Florida. He had, perhaps while being waterboarded, “confessed” that the tag on his stolen Cadillac was owned or provided by his “accomplice”, whose name (mine), somehow got mentioned during the process as being the tag owner and got into a news release.
In a visit to the other tv station I found that they had not reported my name, nor had the newspapers. Some cow-orkers did look at me strangely for a few days, but there were no lasting fallouts. I was subpoenaed to appear at the kid’s trial at which I did not have to testify and at which he got a 6 year sentence. I never followed up to see if and how long he served.
I’m reminded of a friend back in Albuquerque who drove an old VW bus. He had the required New Mexico tag on one end, whichever end was required, but kept his old Colorado plate on the other end! I questioned the legality of that, but he said what cop is going to look at both ends?
Washington DC has just announced that from now on, all police calls are to go through 911:
911 and 311
[from Diane Groomes, Ass’t Chief of Police]
I met with the Office of Unified Communications last Friday and it has been discussed that ALL POLICE RELATED CALLS MUST BE CALLED INTO 911. 311 will now be used for the Mayor’s Customer Service Requests [Ed. note - formerly 727-1000].
911 – all police matters – emergency and non emergency - fires, ambulance
311 - all other governmental agency requests/city services – cars towed, streetlights replaced, streets repaired, animal issues, abandoned vehicles, trees trimmed, trash pickups, etc.
DIANE C GROOMES
Assistant Chief of Police
Patrol Services and School Security Bureau
Metropolitan Police Department
801 Shepherd St NW
202 576-6660 office
202-996-3386 pager
diane.groomes@dc.gov
I have license plates all over my inner garage walls, too, but I didn’t steal them. They’re expired.
You could have stolen them and THEN they expired. 
W.T.F? So, now you’re complaining that the deviants didn’t follow your twisted logic and fucked with your car instead?