911 Calls By Cellphone Swamp California Patrol

from the not-this-again dept

Fri, Mar 28th 2003 1:14pm — Mike Masnick

A year ago we posted an article about how accidental 911 calls from mobile phones were swamping police dispatchers. I know that the two times in the past couple of years that I've had to call 911 (once after witnessing an accident, and once when seeing a guy who appeared to be asleep while driving swerving across the highway) I received an "all operators are busy message both times. Apparently, the New York Times has found that the situation hasn't gotten any better. They say whenever there's an accident, hundreds of people call in to report it, since everyone seems to have a cell phone these days. Police are trying to better locate where the calls are coming from, not only to be able to respond faster, but also to better route the calls. If all the calls are coming from one region, it's more important just to find out what happened then to answer each and every one of those calls. The other issue is that people are too quick to call 911. Some people apparently call it to ask for directions, while others just call accidentally. They say that 1/3 of all calls these days to 911 are accidental calls by a phone in someone's purse or pocket.

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

1 Comment

If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...

Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread

rama r, 28 Mar 2003 @ 2:28pm

No Subject Given
ya- i called 911 a couple of times in the past few years in the bay area also (to report an accident and a reckless drunk? driver) both times it said the queue was full.
Kinda scary considering its meant for emergencies...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]