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The Fatal Flaw of 911

21 points plunge 1 hour ago 19 comments

gambiting 1 hour ago | parent

I was curious if 112 works in the US and apparently it does, but it routes to 911 anyway. Oh well, that's a shame - for context, 112 on this side of the pond will connect you to a general dispatcher which decides if the call should go to the police, firemen or medical dispatcher. Avoids the problem highlighted in the article.

ACS_Solver 52 minutes ago | parent

More accurately, 112 is the EU emergency number (and the GSM standard) but actual organization of emergency services is entirely national so who deals with your call and how will be local. The article also points out that handling of 911 is local in the US, even if apparently most 911 dispatchers are somehow subordinate to the police.

Also, like 112 forwards to 911 in the US, most cell networks in the EU will forward 911 to 112. American cultural dominance has made it so everyone knows 911 and even Europeans apparently end up dialing it.

Kwpolska 43 minutes ago | parent

I wouldn't look as far as cultural dominance. If you're abroad and in an emergency, you're just going to dial the number you remember from your home country on autopilot, and there's no good reason not to support that if the number isn't already taken for something else.

ACS_Solver 23 minutes ago | parent

Yes, sure. But I am talking about Europeans, not Americans, who know 911. I see kids here who are familiar with 911 just through American media, which is really the only source here for anyone to know the number.

jacquesm 27 minutes ago | parent

I had a weird thing happening with that. I just returned from dinner in Germany driving through a semi-industrial area in the netherlands when I spotted a fire in one of the buildings we drove past. I called 112 and was connected to the German dispatcher and they couldn't connect me to the Dutch fire department. So they sent the German firetruck across the border and meanwhile alerted their Dutch colleagues as well. Apparently my phone had not yet re-registered with the dutch network even though we were already well across the border.

cyclopeanutopia 21 minutes ago | parent

> American cultural dominance has made it so everyone knows 911 and even Europeans apparently end up dialing it.

This is a ridiculous opinion.

tallanvor 32 minutes ago | parent

You understand that 911 is a central dispatcher, not to the police specifically, right? That they default more to the police is a completely different issue.

And I much prefer only having to worry about remembering 911. In Norway I'm supposed to remember to call 112 for the police, 110 if there's a fire, and 113 if I need an ambulance or am having a medical emergency.

mixdup 31 minutes ago | parent

The linked article isn't entirely correct. Yes, in smaller counties and towns the 911 call center may be led by the police department but in any city of any meaningful size, the E911 call center is a stand alone department. Sometimes within a wider public safety department but that department usually includes fire in addition to police, and 911 is usually a peer to the police not subordinate

The focus should be on who is dispatched on the types of calls, not the organizational structure, because in most places it's already what you'd expect and not part of the police

There needs to be a force that can be dispatched to these types of calls, just like they know to send the Fire Department if it requires some kind of engineering/rescue but isn't a fire and isn't a medical call

mindslight 30 minutes ago | parent

911 also decides where the call should go. The problem is that decision often includes the police for liability (sounds like the person might be violent, even if the root cause is mental health) and/or logistics (a fire usually requires traffic/crowd control) reasons, and they generally respond the quickest (because they don't need to put on their gear, are already patrolling, and have smaller vehicles).

chrisweekly 15 minutes ago | parent

In the US, 911 is treated as a generic "emergency" dispatcher. I don't have stats handy but am pretty sure 911 calls are at least as likely to result in an ambulance as a cop (or fire truck).

JumpCrisscross 10 minutes ago | parent

999 works in most places, too.

doctorpangloss 35 minutes ago | parent

there are great books on the evolution of the retail side of policing. police spend most of their time responding to 911 and patrolling (https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Reinvention_of_Poli...) as part of a change towards reactive policing.

how could it trend differently? you would have to come up with an alternative to 911 generally, which is very very hard.

in terms of preserving 911 but improving outcomes, the strongest consensus among experts is that police need more specializations, much like healthcare.

ultimately i think these problems exist everywhere in the world, and communities where homeless interacting with citizens & police issues are acute, like in san francisco, are actually the future, not the past, for other communities. coercion, like the kind that used to exist in California for the mentally ill specifically, is going away everywhere. it's not coming back.

there are many ideas but ideas that are not going to be enacted are not valuable, even if they are interesting to talk about, and once you get a sober look at what really does get enacted and why, the problem shifts from the specifics of mental health and policing interactions to politics and getting elected.

weakfish 13 minutes ago | parent

I think you’re spot on about specialization. Police are chronically under-trained and unequipped to deal with such a broad swathe of what they’re expected to, from speeding tickets to mental health crises. As long as there’s a combination of ill training, high pressure situations, and bad pay, there’s going to be terrible outcomes.

I definitely think that there’s a ton of ways in which the American police state is a horrible shitshow that attracts power-hungry assholes, but I also think that the nature of the job as it is currently set up inevitably will lead to mistakes from cops who wouldn’t have violent behavior otherwise.

That doesn’t excuse it, of course, but it’s important to understand the circumstances that create horrible outcomes.

boredatoms 12 minutes ago | parent

I think theres a government organizational aspect, that in the US the police forces are often very small. If the forces we’re combining into larger units the specialization becomes economical.

As an example, in the state of New South Wales in Australia, its 1 police force organization for the whole state (8 million people)

Animats 33 minutes ago | parent

Well, there's 311, for non-police non-emergencies.[1] New York City is serious about it, but most other places are not.

[1] https://portal.311.nyc.gov/about-nyc-311/

slowhadoken 10 minutes ago | parent

They reroute you to nonemergency where a female dispatcher chuckles at your very real problem so crime stats stay low?

sicktriple 6 minutes ago | parent

> female dispatcher

Buddy, you are projecting so hard lmao