911 is a joke. We should all know that by now. If patrol officers didn’t have to always be ready to answer the next bullshit call, they could do a lot more to prevent crime. I’ve written about this.
I’ve always argued that while rapid response doesn’t make sense for police, it does for ambos and fire trucks. David Kohn writes in the Baltimore Sun that there are problems with repeat 911 for ambulances as well. One person called for an ambo every third day:
Baltimore’s busy public ambulance service went out on more than 150,000 calls last year, responding to everything from car accidents to heart attacks. About 2,000 of those calls were from the same 91 people.
…
“We want to get these people better healthcare so they don’t call 911 so much,” said Dr. Joshua M. Sharfstein, Baltimore’s commissioner of health.
I’d like to give people better police serviceso they don’t call 911 so much.
One woman in my sector called police at least 600 times a year. She’d call a couple times a day starting around 5am when she got up to sweep the street. She called for drug dealing. She was right. There was drug dealing. It’s just too bad we couldn’t really do anything about it. Not with her calling 911 so much.