But according to Jessica Gillooly, a former call taker and research fellow at the Policing Project at New York University Law School who studies the role of call taking in the criminal justice system, it has a glaring flaw. Call takers are trained and incentivized to think of minimizing potential safety risk to police officers as their highest priority. That means if a caller is uncertain or ambiguous — for instance, simultaneously speculating that the event unfolding could be either a man at a park with a gun a potential violent threat or a kid playing with a toy gun a clearly innocuous act — call takers are more likely to classify the incident as more serious to ensure officers are prepared for the worst-case scenario.
This emphasis produces systemic police over-response. Scholarly research has found that between 20 and 40 percent of all crime calls that call takers enter are downgraded by officers once at the scene. In other words, officers routinely arrive on the scene primed for a far more dangerous, serious encounter than actually exists.
In some cases, this means officers end up killing unarmed civilians like Rice, Serna, and Nehad, each of whom they were led to believe had weapons. More commonly, the result is the sort of humiliation, fear, and aggression that can occur when officers believe they are entering a situation far more serious than it actually is.
Public safety is too important to leave to a game of Telephone. Some million calls are made to every year. Tens of millions — possibly hundreds of millions — more are made to non-emergency and alarm lines. In the real world, however, this gatekeeper function tends to devolve into a just-send-the-police function. Most jurisdictions have only three types of first responders: fire, medical, and police. And typically there are narrow, predefined criteria for sending in firefighters or EMTs.
Gillooly, the former call taker and researcher, says she rarely denied police services no matter how benign the situation seemed. Sending police to situations like these can have devastating consequences. Instead, activists point to a variety of potential non-police first responders , from trained mediators to crisis specialists to community patrols, that would be better suited to address problems like homelessness, mental illness, and traffic accidents.
In the wake of recent protests against police violence, cities like San Francisco , Oakland , Portland , Denver , Minneapolis , Albuquerque , and Los Angeles are developing their own civilian first responder programs. And Sens. Our call takers screen at a much higher level to determine whether police really are the right response. My conversations with Zeedyk and others made clear that call takers will be crucial to the success of any non-police response efforts.
And incentives for call takers more broadly could be changed to incorporate the social costs of sending a police over-response. A more sweeping solution would be to invest in significantly upgrading the technology that call takers use.
A modest federal investment could change that. This would mean that both the level of police response and whether police are sent in at all would be left up to predefined criteria instead of the subjective discretion of the call taker, which could be subject to all kinds of momentary biases.
The criteria-based dispatching model is often used in medical and firefighting dispatching centers and has been credited with curbing over-response. The approach is being piloted for policing in a handful of cities including Seattle, Tucson, Houston, and Washington, DC.
Some places have gone a step further. Houston call-taking scripts involve mandatory questions to assess whether the given incident involves someone experiencing a mental health crisis. If a case does involve a mental health component, it is flagged for dispatchers. And for those cases, the city employs a handful of mental health clinicians to sit with dispatchers and help them determine the appropriate first response: a civilian clinician team, a co-response team of police and clinicians, or a police team.
The result is that of the 40,plus calls that were flagged by call takers as having a mental health component in , only 0. Of course, without the availability of non-police first responders , reforms like these will only go so far. Choosing as the universal emergency number was not an arbitrary selection, but it wasn't a difficult one either. They wanted a number that was short and easy to remember. More importantly, they needed a unique number , and since had never been designated for an office code, area code or service code, that was the number they chose.
Soon after, the U. Congress agreed to support as the emergency number standard for the nation and passed legislation making the exclusive number for any emergency calling service.
A central office was set up by the Bell System to develop the infrastructure for the system. On Feb. The Alabama Telephone Company carried the call. A week later, Nome, Alaska, implemented a system. In , the White House's Office of Telecommunication issued a national statement supporting the use of and pushed for the establishment of a Federal Information Center to assist government agencies in implementing the system.
After its initial acceptance in the late s, systems quickly spread across the country. By , about 26 percent of the United States population had service, and nine states had passed legislation for a statewide system. Through the latter part of the s, service grew at a rate of 70 new local systems per year, according to the NENA.
Approximately 50 percent of the U. In an emergency, dial on your phone. Per federal law, you must be able to dial from any pay phone without depositing money and from any cell phone even if the service has been cancelled.
Stay calm and state your emergency. Speak loudly and clearly. Give the call taker your name, phone number and the address where help is needed. Operators follow a specific line of questioning to assist with rapid identification of the situation and collection of facts.
Operators do not ask these questions because they are nosy. Their primary concern is to obtain as much information as is possible to expedite the emergency response by the public safety agency and for the safety of the public and police or fire responders.
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