Sixthly, some 911 operators suck. Fact. Maybe OP gets the bad ones.
My first thought is that the 911 operators have been trained to follow a script and they’re afraid that if they deviate from that script and things go badly they will be personally blamed for the outcome.
But I think there’s a more subtle explanation. Like AZRob, I’m wonder where you heard these calls. If you found an online collection called “outrageous 911 bloopers” and that’s where you’re getting this from, then I’d say there’s a very reasonable explanation.
We have 330 million people in this country. Over a ten-year span, I’d guess more than half of them will end up calling 911 at least once. Some of them will call several times. So let’s figure half a billion phone calls. It is extremely likely that if you do ANYTHING half a billion times, at least a few of them will go badly. This is the nature of things. It doesn’t prove there’s anything inherently wrong with the way things are set up, or the intelligence of the people involved. It’s just the law of averages.
Imagine a dart board on a wall in your apartment. Suppose you are annoyed by the fact that once in a while you throw a dart and it misses the board completely, leaving a tiny hole in your wall. What’s the solution? Get a bigger dart board? Okay, opposite problem, suppose that you have a board which is too big and it keeps getting hit by things that aren’t darts (like your elbow while you’re walking to the bathroom). No matter how big or how small you make the dart board, it is inevitable that some darts will miss it and some non-darts will hit it. That doesn’t mean we should get rid of all dart boards or that there’s no such thing as the optimum size. The mere fact that someone found a tiny hole in your wall does not in and of itself prove that you should have gotten a bigger board. In general terms, no matter where you draw a line, no matter how well you design a system, there will always be the chance of things failing which should succeed and things succeeding which should fail. And the more times you repeat, the greater the probability becomes.
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They are asking about the sex of the (in this case, decapitated baby on the kitchen counter) victim…
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What are you going to do, bleed on me?
Can I please get a window seat on that bus?
Stoid, you say you’re hearing a lot of 911 calls lately. Is this a TV show you’re watching?
I too am curious as to where one “listens” to 911 calls. If on the internet, one would expect it is the unusual or ineptly handled ones that would be disproportionately selected for.
I’ve called 911 twice and in both cases it was handled swiftly and with great professionalism.
I am curious if the caller is liable for fees, and if so are they covered by insurance.
Not any more. I once butt dialed 911 on my cell and got a call back from the police; they knew exactly where I was (in the college cafeteria) and asked me to confirm.
911 also begins recording you before the operator picks up the phone. I happened to hear a couple of 911 calls when I was on a jury and you could hear the people dialing and saying, “Oh My God!” before the operator got on.
There are always more than one operator on duty. At the first call, they start sending help; for something like a fire, there may be multiple calls. I can also see a reason to keep the caller on the line for certain types of calls, so you ask questions.
And that’s another reason to keep asking questions: You want to establish whether this is the same emergency that you’ve already dispatched services for. If there’s a one-house fire that could easily be handled by a single engine, but 20 people call it in, you don’t want to send 20 engines to deal with it.
I’m a supervisor in a 9-1-1 center. I’ll try to first address the questions from the OP.
First caveat. ALL procedures are subject to customization by the local jurisdiction.
Often the operator you are speaking to is not the person dispatching help.
Operators are generally trained to ask a particular short series of calls from all callers, regardless of the nature of the call. Exact wording and order may vary.
- Where is the emergency help needed?
- What happened?
- Is anyone in need of emergency medical help? Age and sex of the patient(s)?
- What kind of weapons), if any, were involved?
- What is the telephone number we can call you back on if we get disconnected?
Before help can be sent the operator needs to, at an absolute minimum, know the location where help is needed, and the nature of what is going on. The location help is needed is sometimes different that the automatic location information that tells the operator where the caller is calling from (assuming the local 9-1-1 center even has such information). Without location and nature information the dispatcher cannot know what type of emergency services to send or where to send them.
If the event seems like a violent incident then fire or EMS responders may not approach the scene until police have made the scene safe, so information about weapons may affect the order in which emergency services are dispatched.
Many people do hang up the phone and having the contact phone number verified is better than relying upon a Caller-ID number. It is rare, but occasionally my computer screen does not display the correct Caller-ID number.
MANY, MANY times callers will report someone is dead when that is not the case. This is so frequent that it is almost a maxim that an untrained layperson reporting someone is dead means there is a 99% chance that no one is dead.
The operator needs to understand how many patients there are to know how many ambulances to send. And the operator needs to understand what is happening to talk the caller through providing first aid to anyone who is injured.
For the safety of all emergency responders the operators needs to know if weapons are involved in any threats to kill, and if so what type of weapons. This will affect whether EMS will stage away form the scene, and how far, as well as how much backup the police may need before heading in to the scene.
The age and sex of a patient may be relevant to the likely cause of a medical problem. I think about possible ob/gyn issues for a 29 year old female with upper abdominal pain. I think of possible cardiac involvement for a 63 year old male with upper abdominal pain. In short, such information is so often useful that asking about the age and sex of all patients has become standard practice in medical calls. Of course it is not relevant in a decapitation which, gratefully, is extremely rare.
Actually it does matter. A lot. First aid protocols may be quite different depending upon the location of a gunshot wound. For example, our local protocols would avoid placing pressure on a wound to the skull where the underlying bone may be broken for fear of driving bone into brain matter. We would advise direct pressure for a wound to an extremity, on the other hand.
You touch on the possibility of a prank. And that does happen. Prank calls often present scenarios that seem far to outrageous to be real.
We still roll emergency services. But we owe an obligation to all the other citizens out on the road not to send emergency responders to a seeming urgent event if we can determine the call is a hoax.
Your question is a Hi-Jack but the simple answer is NO, so don’t hesitate to call and save a life. :dubious:
Outstanding, thank you very much!
Jerk.
Who is? When do they start listening in to the call to know who to send? Does the operator flag their screen and that’s how they know?
Back to the op, when in this list does help typically get notified to respond?
Don’t you have to have GPS enabled for that?
You don’t even have to dial 911. 91 will do. In my office you need to dial 9 to get an outside line, and I was working in a trailer one night where you don’t have to do that, and I forgot. I dialed 9-1 to start a long distance call, remembered I didn’t need the 9, so I hung up, made the call again, and went back to work. A short while later I realized someone was standing over my desk. I looked up and it was a police officer. Dispatch had informed him of a 911 hang up from my location and tasked him investigate.
I was impressed he found me. I was in a temporary trailer in a field behind several buildings down a long, winding driveway, and I had trouble getting coworkers from other areas to find me back there.
Exactly! I can understand needing certain details, but you shouldn’t need them before you even get someone helpful in motion! Keep asking and sending data, but GO.
I called 911 once, when I was 17 or 18. I was waiting at a bus stop in Seattle, the birthplace of Medic 1, and an older (75+) gentleman who was also waiting there fell over, like a tree does when felled. He sustained an injury on his upper left or right forehead which was bleeding. I don’t believe he lost consciousness, but he was not responding verbally to our questions, seemed very disoriented, and was unable to stand up. I volunteered to go to a nearby restaurant to call 911 and reported what I just wrote.
The dispatcher kept asking questions as though it were my job to determine whether the situation was serious enough for them to send help for this poor guy. Her attitude was extremely condescending, snotty, and frustrating and I ended up saying something like “Send someone if you want, I’m hanging up now”, and I hung up. It seemed as though she were looking for reasons NOT to send help.
I returned to the scene and the poor guy was in much the same condition, sitting on the curb, disoriented, and not able to speak. Other folks were taking care of him so I ended up leaving on the next bus.
I hope he got the help he needed. We had always been taught that calling 911 would bring help, especially in Seattle, so this was a very disillusioning experience.
Old rotary dial phone?
An anecdote from OKC on the day my wife called 911 for my heart stopping: When she called, the lady ‘operator’ took the basic info right away (what, where, etc), and then said she was going to ‘take over her phone’ for location purposes. All of a sudden my wife’s cell started flashing/beeping/buzzing and displaying it was in 911-mode. The operator said EMS-services had already been alerted to general area as I had told wife the intersection and where to find us from there. I presume that the ‘takeover’ of the phone gave exact GPS-coordinates to pinpoint where the responders were to go. I do recall that big shiny firetruck pulling up without any hint of not knowing where to go - the guys were jumping out and running to me ASAP. Then darkness ensued for me…
During the time between the phone-takeover, the operator was asking all kinds of relevant informational questions and giving ETA’s, and I know that ‘dispatch’ can patch a phone call directly into the responders’ radio(s) so they can be best prepared upon arrival. I am assuming that many of the questions being asked are actually heard by the responders in many cases where E-911 is available since I do recall the first guy off firetruck (which arrived first followed by ambulance a few minutes later according to wife, but I had gone unconscious by that time) asked me what was up with my slowing heart-rate, etc, as he dragged me out of driver’s seat. He was already pretty well informed of what was up and took appropriate action(s). That’s the last I remember until waking up in ambulance. Outstanding performance by the ‘system’ - responders alerted to roll out right away with approximate location to go to, but the more they know, the better they can be prepared upon arrival, IMHO.
Basically, dispatch sent folks my way pretty much immediately, and then got further details as they approached my location. System, overall, worked outstanding. And saved my life/brain function, etc, no doubt.
I know there are lots of places that do not have such capabilities, and feel they should be made to upgrade/improve. It makes a huge difference, IME. That is how it is supposed to happen, IMHO.
So, we still don’t have any of these examples of 911 operators asking stupid questions. Stoid, would you perhaps care to share some of them? It’d make it a lot easier to explain why the questions made sense if we actually knew what the questions were.
Typically one or more other people are responsible for dispatching the call. It is common to break up dispatching responsibility so that one person is responsible for ambulance dispatch and another is responsible for police dispatch.
The dispatchers may not listen to the call at all. They get the information once it is typed into the computer system.
The operator types information into the computer system and hits a button that sends the information to the dispatcher(s). Our system requires some sort of information be entered as to the location and nature of the event before it will let the operator hit that “finished” button to send the call to the dispatcher(s).
Many 9-1-1 systems automatically get information about the caller’s location even if the caller’s phone is not GPS enabled. But around 10% of the US population live in areas where no location information is provided. Regardless, the operator still needs to verify where the help should be sent since many times the caller is not at the same location as the emergency.
For urgent calls, everything but the call back telephone number is needed to start a safe response by the correct number and type of responders.
For many urgent calls our system also sends a text message alert direct to responders giving the address and nature code of the emergency, even prior to the radio dispatcher providing full details.
For low priority calls (I want my neighbor arrested for Damage to Property because he backed over my geraniums when he pulled out of his driveway this morning.) the dispatch may wait until every last relevant question is asked and answered.
That question wasn’t a hijack. The OP’s question has been answered and CP’s question directly relates to the subject matter.
Also, your tone was rather harsh.
Here is the standard patient assessment for EMTs. I can’t speak for police or fire, but most of the first questions in a medical emergency help with sizing up the scene. In my area, the questions are also entered into a simple program that gives a suspected nature of illness/injury and first steps for treatment. This is where the operator gets the suggestions to lay down, chew baby aspirin but don’t swallow, apply pressure, etc… Also, 911 operators in some areas are not be allowed to end a call until a first responder arrives on scene, so they have to do something to kill the time.
Many jurisdictions have trained the entire fire departments to be first responders, if not EMTs. There may be more firs stations, and I think they just drive faster. 
I did a few ride outs with paramedics. Whenever we received a call for chest pains, we were beaten to the scene by firemen who had already given the patient aspirin and may have had their oxygen already set up.