Emergency 911

While driving home from Shaun's this morning I found myself listening to the morning crew at 95.5 talk about the whole 911 thing that's going on in the Dirty Dirty D right now. For those who don't know, Jeffrey Fieger, former gubernatorial candidate and defense attorney for Dr. Jack Kevorkian, has taken the case of a woman who called 911 in Detroit after having been shot five times only to have the 911 operator accuse her of making a crank call, tell her to put someone else on the phone to confirm the injuries, and deadpan, "You wouldn't still be alive if you were shot five times!" The woman who had been shot (and yes, she'd actually been shot five times) ended up hanging up the phone and calling back two hours later, when emergency vehicles were FINALLY sent to her home to discover the five bullet wounds in various parts of her body.

This has brought to light another call to 911 in Detroit by a little boy who called to report that his mother had been shot only to be admonished in a highly unprofessional manner by the operator that, "When the police get there you gonna be in trouble!" On the radio this morning they played the tapes back to back in an attempt to determine if the same 911 operator took both of the calls, but it was too hard to tell. I personally think it sounded like two different people, which is even more disgusting than the idea that just one person in the world could do that.

The 911 switchboard, or whatever it's called, claims that 25% of the phone calls it gets are prank calls, and they "train" their operators to try to weed out the prank calls. Excuse me, but last I checked I thought it was illegal to call 911 if it's not a bonafide emergency. If I call 911 and only get to say, "HELP! I live at blah blah blah, I've been shot--" and then my would be murderer cuts the phone line, I want to be DAMN sure that at least one cop and one ambulance are en route to my house within 1 minute of that disconnect. That's why I pay taxes. There are kids, and stupid people, in this world who will call 911 as a joke, but nothing will put them off thinking it's funny like having a fully uniformed Detroit cop (or two) show up at your door ready to bust somebody's shit, only to find out that little Billy thought it'd be a giggle to call 911 and hang up 5 times while his mom was in the shower.

As much as I want to criticize Detroit's government for this, I suppose I can understand why they do this. It costs a lot of money to send a cop out on a 911 call, and it takes him or her away from whatever else they were doing -- which in the D is a lot. If it turns out to be a fake call I'm sure that they'd rather not have sent a squad car out because of the financial factor, in spite of the fact that that is probably the best deterrent to prank calls. (Little Billy tells his friends what happened when he did it, so they tell their friends, who tell their cousins, and pretty soon every kid in the neighborhood knows that the S.W.A.T. team shows up when you prank 911.) It would be too easy to criticize Detroit's government for cutting money from the Police Department (and the Fire Department, and Public Schools, etc.), and it wouldn't really be fair because they've had to cut money from EVERYWHERE because there is NO money....

But how much money did the Detroit casinos earn in 2005? And what percentage of that amount went to the city? Right. That's what I thought.