this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2025
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Somebody is going to get killed from this.
For sure.
If they've got a problem with non-emergency callers dialing 911, surely it would be best to try and reduce that problem through other means (such as fining persistent inappropriate use of 911)
I don't want to talk to a robot when I'm on the floor dying.
I think the non-emergency number should be heavily advertised. I have no idea what the local one for me is (if it even exists)
Promoting that the nunber exists as a actual thing people should use is good, yeah. :)
The actual number isn't so important, though. If ever needed to call the non-emergency number I'd search it up, which fortunately I can do given I've got loads of time because it's not an emergency.
I would bet there are large swaths of people that don't know there is a nonemergency number to look up.
Maybe they need to send something out to residents every six months or something, letting them know about the non-emergency number because I have this exact same issue. I've lived here for three years and have no idea if a non-emergency number even exists. It probably does. I just haven't looked it up because I haven't even thought about it.
What happens if you put "police your_city" in your favorite search engine? I tried it with my current city and the village where I grew up, and both led me to the phone number in reasonable time.
That does work (actually 'non emergency city state'). But as another comment mentions, the public knowing it exists is more important than the number itself.
Well....I'm anti-AI as it gets, and I don't support this measure, but I would like to point out if you're on the floor dying, that WOULD be an emergancy call.
And an LLM determining that accurately would be a dice roll.
A young person died in my youth crisis shelter because instead of getting 911, I was first redirected to a semi-literate moron working in a VOIP "call center". Her Southern Alabama drawl was so severe I could not even recognize she was speaking English at first. This "call center" was also "experiencing higher than normal call volumes".
Last week I was driving by a wooden apartment complex and I noticed that somebody's unattended barbecue had gone poof and the balcony was burning. I called 911 and it took 4 minutes to get directed to the fire department.
I'm dumbfounded. I'd be furious if it took more than 20 seconds
I'm a dispatcher (not in the USA) and our managers start flipping out and running round like their heads are on fire if the wait time reaches 30 seconds. If there's more than 3 calls in the emergency queue then they sit down and take them themselves (If you've ever worked in any call centre at all, emergency or not, you'll know shit has to really hit the fan before management will consider doing this!)
Usually high queue time/numbers are just multiple calls for the same incident (think large RTC's or very public assaults/stabbings right in the middle of a heavily trafficked city centre) so we can get that queue down very quickly, especially as 99% of the time any call after the initial one will simply be "we're already aware and we've got crews en route, bye".