Slick Dude Butt-Dials 911 On His Way To A Drug Deal, Is Promptly Arrested

from the high-crimes dept

Mon, Sep 15th 2014 8:41pm — Timothy Geigner

This somehow keeps happening. We've covered criminals accidentally butt-dialing the police and discussing their crimes while the authorities listened in, presumably with bemused expressions upon their fortunate faces. Then we talked about it again, proving that really stupid lightning apparently strikes twice. Well, it apparently strikes thrice, because yet another criminal, this one a rather minor ne'er do well, has landed himself in cuffs when his ass-cheeks went rogue and dialed 911.

Mt. Pleasant police say they arrested a man for drugs after he pocket-dialed 911 and dispatchers heard him talking about getting high and going to a drug dealer's house. The call came in to the Maury County 911 Center Friday evening. Dispatchers were able to trace the location of the call to Don Pepe's Mexican Restaurant on North Main Street in Mt. Pleasant.

When police arrived, O'Connor and his friend were already pulling away in a vehicle that had a rear light out and police pulled them over. Inside, officers found marijuana and and some paraphernalia, leading them to charge O'Connor with possession of both. He must have thought these NSA wiretaps had gone entirely too far, until police informed him of the call to 911. He reportedly had no idea the call had ever been made.

Now, while I will say it's starting to feel a bit strange to have police roll a squad car to combat an adult talking about marijuana when that substance's legal status is quickly being relaxed throughout the nation, one wonders if the kind of duncery resulting in a butt dial to police is the result of the drug. If it is, maybe that's an argument that we should all cool it a bit with the weed.

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

Filed Under: butt dialing, drug deal, police

29 Comments

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

Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread

darryl, 15 Sep 2014 @ 9:03pm

I once had a candy bar phone that when locked three keys worked 9 1 and call. I pocket dialed 911 once and found long sequences of 1 and 9 multiple times. Stupid phone.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
JP Jones (profile), 15 Sep 2014 @ 9:16pm

Puts on tinfoil hat...

What if he didn't butt-dial the police? What if the NSA is feeding cops the data and then they just tell the criminal they butt-dialed, after they've taken his phone as "evidence?" Perhaps a more sophisticated version of planting drugs on the body?

Three times does seem to be quite the coincidence, I've never had my phone accidentally dial the police...my last call, sure, but were the criminals commonly calling the police?

Hmmmmmmm...

Slowly backs away...
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Cvnk (profile), 15 Sep 2014 @ 9:34pm

Re:
Honestly I had this same thought. And I'm not even paranoid.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 15 Sep 2014 @ 9:38pm

Parallel Construction?
At what point does it become a coincidence that all these drug busts are a result of "butt-dialing 911"...

Perhaps the backdoor the NSA has installed on all phones is being used to conveniently dial 911 so they can record the call and generate the parallel construction needed for a bust.

Might be some NSA agent's spare time hobby...who knows.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 15 Sep 2014 @ 9:40pm

Re:
Heh, wrote my comment before reading this one...but yeah, seems like there's a pattern here...
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Mark Wing, 15 Sep 2014 @ 10:05pm

While I don't think anyone should go to jail because of marijuana, I think extreme stupidity should be a crime. Unless you're disabled, of course...
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 15 Sep 2014 @ 10:15pm

Sending out a squad car to arrest a guy for *buying* marijuana? They must have run out of rapes, murders, thefts, abused children, and battered wifes.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 15 Sep 2014 @ 11:06pm

coincidence , My Ass!, Stingray is not an accident.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Mr. Smarta**, 15 Sep 2014 @ 11:09pm

Back in my day...
Yeah, because you never saw this happening way back in the day before marijuana was legal. Why in my day, we didn't have a problem with "butt dialing" on our telegraphs. Never happened. Not once. Especially not while we were trying to score some good quality refer out behind the railroad office. We were smarter back then. It's the younger generation these days can't keep control of their mouths... *or* their a**es. Literally!
[ link to this | view in thread ]
That One Guy (profile), 16 Sep 2014 @ 12:19am

Re:
And that is why law enforcement agencies are complete and utter morons to have ever built so much as a single case via parallel construction/evidence laundering, because if they've done it once, they're sure to do in in the future, and that simple fact introduces suspicion into all cases from then on.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Leit, 16 Sep 2014 @ 12:22am

Re:
Many pre-touchscreen Nokias used to do the same. In my country the emergency services number is a combo of 1s and 0s, so I'd haul my phone out of my pocket and see a binary representation of the Pax Romana.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 16 Sep 2014 @ 3:05am

Correlation is not causation
It's not that smoking weed causes butt-dialing, it's butt-dialing that cause people to smoke weed.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Mike (not that Mike, the other Mike), 16 Sep 2014 @ 3:51am

Rolling out a squad car.....
Not every state has relaxed the laws on marijuana. How do you propose the cop traveled from precinct to place of the crime? Teleportation?

I would think that they would send the cops because he talked about going to the dealers house. IANAL or DA but I think that would be intent and probably the cops could have got the dealer in a sting too....but I digress.

As for dialing 911....i have a galaxy s4 and the emergency dial on that is super sensitive and I have called 911 by accident a couple times.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Maggie (profile), 16 Sep 2014 @ 4:14am

Was the 911 call before or after the event?
We already know that law enforcement is happy to use tech to illegally spy on us and then, once arrested, find a way to explain how they had the info they did. Are criminals really butt dialing 911? Seems more likely that the cops just opened the mic on his phone until they got what they were looking for.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Serious Black, 16 Sep 2014 @ 5:40am

Re: tin foil
what is unfortunate about this comment is these days it does not seem completely out of the realm of possibility
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 16 Sep 2014 @ 6:41am

Maybe this guys legal defense should ask for the actual recording of the call , and check the phone for the minutes
and duration of the call (not sure if a E911 call is timed) .
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Dan (profile), 16 Sep 2014 @ 6:51am

Re: Parallel Construction?
On the Galaxy S3, 911 is one of a list of numbers allowed to be dialed in spite of being locked. You can add your own as well. My niece had the butt dialing problem until I cleared 911 from the list. No more butt dials to the cops. On the downside, I don't think anyone can call 911 on her locked phone now, either. But I can't test that, obviously.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
ltlw0lf (profile), 16 Sep 2014 @ 7:11am

Re: Re:
Many pre-touchscreen Nokias used to do the same.

What was really funny was that AAA and several other organizations at the time were running commercials about butt-dialing 911 and they all said that you should make sure your phone was locked before placing it in your pants. I sent an email to these organizations telling them that their advice should have been to not put your phone in your pants, because regardless to whether you locked your phone or not, many phones would allow you to dial 911 whether or not the phone was locked. According to Nokia, they were worried about liability issues, since in an emergency you might not think about having to unlock the phone to dial 911, and thus they allowed the numbers to be dialed in locked mode (but didn't think to put a watchdog in there to see if other numbers were pressed indicating a butt-dial.) The ads disappeared shortly afterward (though I doubt my email had anything to do with them disappearing,) which was sad, because they were really funny. The best one was the guy in the donut shop with the hot cup of coffee.

The new touchscreen phones have the same problem though. The screen usually has "Emergency Call" button, which when pressed when the phone is locked, opens the dialer. This is certainly true for Android phones, but I believe iPhones also have the feature.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
jim, 16 Sep 2014 @ 7:18am

what?
What was the cell system hacker called again? Stingray? And the upgraded system was to listen into "open" phones, could be near you, with the excuse but you dialed "".
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 16 Sep 2014 @ 8:15am

Re: Was the 911 call before or after the event?
If they're able to "open the mic", they've already compromised the phone and may as well make it dial 911 so they'll have the appropriate tower logs etc. to make it seem like butt-dialling.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 16 Sep 2014 @ 8:19am

Re: Parallel Construction?
The busted taillight is also suspicious. Isn't that the most cliched excuse possible for a cop to stop someone?
[ link to this | view in thread ]
art guerrilla (profile), 16 Sep 2014 @ 8:24am

Re:
really...
i live in a ruralish area, and if you have something stolen that is -approx- less than a car, forget about it...
they sound annoyed you even call them with 'petty' shit like that, thanks for protecting and serving, donut-eaters...

what i don't get is, WHY don't you fucking make a fucking report, piggie, then maybe -JUST MAYBE IF YOU DO YOUR FUCKING JOB INSTEAD OF SCARFING DONUTS AND COOPING- when you compile enough reports to have a pattern, you can bust some thieves who wipe out TONS OF PEOPLES 'stuff', but none of it on a case-by-case basis is 'valuable' enough for the piggies to get out of their recliners...

*occasionally*, they will actually catch a thief by random chance (a salient quote comes to mind: even a blind pig will find an acorn once in a while), and -what a surprise!- they often find a garage or shed FILLED with TONS of stuff the thieves have been stealing/selling for YEARS...
huh, who woulda thunk it...

but the useless piggies haven't bothered, because it wasn't cars and expensive jewelery, but a teevee here, a bunch of tools there, an old trailer, an AC unit, whatever, but not really a -you know- 'sexy' crime and stuff...

they have close to ZERO interest in actually solving the petty crimes that MOST PEOPLE experience MOST of the time: 99% of us aren't murdered/raped/beaten during our lives: but *MOST* of the crimes we are victims of is petty theft, which the kops don't give a shit about...

the crimes that affect us the most, they care about the least...
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Prisoner 201, 16 Sep 2014 @ 8:32am

Re:
Was about to post something very similar.

"Butt Dial" is obviously the codename for a NSA program to record sound from microphones of data enabled telephones, regardless if there is a call or not, and uploading it to NSA servers.

You did notice that your battery runs out really fast, right?
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 16 Sep 2014 @ 11:48am

Re: Re: Parallel Construction?
What I can't figure out is why all these drug deals seem to involve vehicles with busted taillights. I mean, it's not like that large a percentage of people on the road have busted taillights.

This leads me to the conclusion that either
a) there is a corollary between being a drug user and having a busted taillight
or
b) drug use is SO prevalent that there is a significant overlap between the drug using community and the small percentage of people driving with a busted taillight.
or
c) Since you can't generally tell if your taillight is busted without a second party viewing it (or having a sensor/rear camera that can tell), police can bust your taillight using some measure and then pull you over for it.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 16 Sep 2014 @ 2:03pm

Re: Re:
me too
[ link to this | view in thread ]
John85851 (profile), 16 Sep 2014 @ 3:12pm

Sounds a little fishy
This story seems a little fishy on a number of levels.

First, can a phone really "butt dial" 911? Did the guy have it programmed as a speed dial? Was the guy using a phone marketed to elderly people with huge buttons that can be easily pressed?
What are the chances of a "butt" turning the phone on, entering the 4-digit unlock code, switching to the phone app, dialing a 9, then 1, then 1, then hitting Send?

Did the police release what kind of phone he used? It would be interesting to see if his type of phone is even physically capable of mis-dialing.

And why are people still getting busted for marijuana? Yes, I know it's not legal in every state, but why don't people just wait until it does become legal? Then they can get a license and they won't get arrested.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 16 Sep 2014 @ 5:00pm

Re: Sounds a little fishy
According to Wikipedia, it's in the GSM (and presumably later) standards that both 112 and the local emergency number be dialable without unlocking. On many smartphones it's possible to configure the phone app to have an icon on the lock screen, and likely those will dial the emergency number without needing an unlock.

In 2000, the number of butt-dials of the emergency services was over 30 000, so apparently it's a common problem.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Sheogorath (profile), 16 Sep 2014 @ 9:33pm

Just like Home Alone
*channels Macauley Culkin*
Hey, gu-uys! I'm a big dumb pothead on my way to a deal, you better come and arrest me!
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 17 Sep 2014 @ 12:01pm

If the number 9 his held down on some phones, 911 is automatically dialed.
[ link to this | view in thread ]