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Originally Posted by curves2000
WhiteTiger,
Do you have any idea how many accidental 911 calls happen on a daily basis? I used to work at a big 5 bank's main office downtown and we had a very large employee base for personal and commercial banking.
Long story short the amount of accidental 911 calls that resulted from bank employee's needing to dial 9 on the company phone to dial out and than calling 911 in error, was staggering. I understand that since we were a financial institution that police were required to respond to the building and check things out.
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Not just because it was a bank. It's CPS' policy that any and every time a phone calls 911, that extensive due diligence be done to attempt to find the phone and figure out what's going on. I've only not been able to 'find' a phone once, and that's because the person on it utterly refused to stop moving around the city and talk to police. After an hour and a half, it was decided that they were clearly not in any immediate danger, and I was allowed to stop trying to make contact.
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Our one branch, at 1 company was literally having police respond several times a week in error and it got me thinking that this scenario must play out hundreds of times a month across downtown Calgary. As a taxpayer it made me upset that police resources were being wasted on this stupidity when an easy fix was to change the requirement for dialing 9 as a start. Surely a City Bylaw change or a provincial law change could have resolved this.
Thanks!
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In my experience, it's not uncommon to have around 50-150 of these a day. I'm not sure what they'd average out to over the year, but weekday 'business hours' are obviously the worst, while night shift (or rather, past 8pm) almost never sees them.
Businesses are the worst for it, as you noted most have to dial '9' to get out. What makes it even trickier is that most businesses will dial 9 for an outside line, then 1 for long distance, then take a couple moments to look over the number and...by that time, your phone may assume you are trying to dial 911, fill the extra 1 in for you, and then you are talking to us. I don't know what the criteria is for a phone to fill in the extra 1, but a lot of them do, as the number of people I hear who say some variation on "I was dialing long distance and just paused to make sure I had the right numbers..." is very high. Because of this, businesses are slowly starting to switch to 8 for an outside line. However, I don't know what that's doing to Healthlink's false call rate, as they are 811.
Next, we see a lot of folks who use those Long Distance calling cards doing much the same thing as the businesses above. Those are the two biggest situations that we get 911 misdials from.
It is hard (for me, at any rate, given the access to the numbers I have) to pin down an exact number, as the ones I can look at class a 911 misdial and a 911 hangup as the same thing. So I can't get a solid number on either.
In my personal experience, I'll deal with 1-15 a shift, depending on the shift.