The article says the vast majority of places do not know where you are when you call 911; is that true?
I've toured our 911 call center, since I am a volunteer firefighter, and when you call on a cell phone you are immediately located by GPS and displayed on a map, and even tracked for a short time after you hang up.
And I would not expect Marion county Kansas to be up and coming technology-wise.
Unless it’s changed recently, Bay Area 911 calls all get routed to CHP in Vallejo and they didn’t have any information of where you are if calling from a cell phone.
Perhaps its time to get them onto the ESINet with a modern SIP stack and dispatch console. You can only kick the can down the road so far, this is an upgrade that has been clearly needed for many years.
Does anyone know if you have to have the GPS radio of the phone switched on for that to work? I keep my GPS and WIFI radios switched off for both privacy and to reduce the drain on the battery unless I specifically need it on when lost.
The OS overrides location service settings during emergency calls
> When using Emergency SOS to call emergency services, the call may include your location, regardless of whether you enable Location Services, to allow the dispatcher to assist you.
There is no legislation requiring this of device (or OS) vendors, but carriers are legally required to make location information available to emergency services, and I think are even prohibited from connecting phones that don’t make this possible. So market forces effectively ensure that all phones do this.
The exception is when the call is too short to get a lock for GPS and location can’t be determined. The phone will still transmit what it can (say, WiFi proximity derived location). Worse case is fall through to carrier triangulation.
There is no such thing as a GPS radio in a phone in the sense of something that broadcasts a signal. GPS signals are broadcast by satellites and any device on earth can choose to listen for the signal and triangulate their position by receiving the signal from multiple satellites. GPS doesn't send out any signal from your phone to work. In the same way that your eyeballs don't need to emit light for you to see (unless you're a superhero). Phones broadcast signal to connect to cell networks and wifi networks.
Now if you expect your phone to show your position on a map (using the GPS coordinates it calculated from the satellite signal) then it likely needs to retrieve map data from the internet (and in doing so it might be broadcasting over cell or wifi frequencies). But that's a different story.
Much confusion is caused by people saying "I tracked X with GPS" with the implication that GPS allows tracking of remote objects. It doesn't. It allows the remote object to know its own location. For that information to get to someone else (the spy in the chasing vehicle) the remote object needs to be broadcasting that location information through some other means (which has nothing to do with GPS).
I think most everyone but you interprets “GPS radio” in GP’s post to mean a “radio capable of reviving the GPS signal” same as I would call the thing in the middle of car’s dash an AM/FM radio.
The network knows the signal strength between you and the cell towers nearest you. You are usually within range of more than one cell tower. That can locate you fairly accurately. Network data like this is used to augment GPS which can have problems among tall buildings for example.
The cell towers know where your phone is whenever it has signal. It's not as accurate as modern GPS, but 5G especially can locate you to within about a hundred meter radius. Precision varies wildly depending on conditions, distance, etc.
GPS is entirely passive (it is receive only), so leaving it on is harmless for your privacy on Apple devices. For Android... well, if you have an Android phone, you're not a privacy-conscious consumer by definition, so just leave it on for the convenience of not having to turn it on and off manually all the time!
WiFi, again, is not that big a deal with Apple because they rotate your unique MAC address to preserve your privacy. Android is a mixed bag, depends on the model of phone you purchased.
I believe it has to do with the age of the 911 system. Older systems do not support remote location, microphone and camera access.
Apparently the US 911 system integrated some Israeli tech from a company founded by Israeli intelligence personnel called Reporty Homeland Security that later rebranded as Carbyne. Carbyne was headed by former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak. The company, received much of its initial funding from Jeffery Epstein and Ehud Barak.
I don't know if any of the Israeli tech is running on handsets, but it is definitely running on the back-end in the US 911 emergency call systems. The on-device portion of the 911 emergency calling that grants remote access to location, video, and microphone is part of the closed, proprietary, Google Play Services, on Android.
If running a de-googled rom, you will presumably not be sending any location data or providing other access to your phone when calling 911.
Someone who is usually reliable stated that Scott Bessent had strong ties to this company, Ahud Barrak, and Jeffery Epstien (and was instrumental in getting Carbyne's tech adopted by US 911 system). But, I have not found evidence documenting Bessent's ties to Carbyne. If someone knows more about this-- either confirming or definitively refuting, please share.
It depends. There are two tiers of location tracking, and parts of it come down to E911, and cellular tower data. I could pull up dispatch on our MDTs (Tiburon) and see GPS coordinates and a confidence value and whether it was triangulation or direct location.
I suspect Atlanta PD assumes the extremely meager budget (0.06%) for PAD is coming out of their very hefty cut of the city budget (30%+) and has been pushing against anything that smells like an alternative to their punitive model.
There is a difficult balance to strike in these types of calls (e.g. mental health crisis). On the one hand, the presence of police can escalate tensions and cause a situation to spiral out of control when it might not have otherwise. On the other hand, when a situation does get out of control, police are by far the best equipped to keep responders and bystanders safe. It can be a tough judgment call for responders to make
The Eugene CAHOOTS team has existed since 1989 until it was shut down recently. Dispatchers make the call as to whether or not to send police officers along with CAHOOTS responders on a per call basis.
Quoting vera.org: “ Of the estimated 24,000 calls CAHOOTS responded to in 2019, only 311 required police backup, and in Eugene, CAHOOTS teams resolved almost 20 percent of all calls coming through the city’s public safety communications center.”
To the best of my knowledge, no CAHOOTS staff have died or been seriously injured on the job. I’m not sure the evidence shows that finding the right balance is dangerous. Hard for sure, CAHOOTS put a lot of effort into building the right relationship with the police, but the risk to responders is overstated.
I lived in Eugene previously and CAHOOTS is (seems they are still operating in Springfield) quite effective in the limited response work they do, particularly de-escalation and triage of mental health crises. These are classic situations that (American) police are not needed nor are most properly trained for, and several crisis intervention teams modelled after CAHOOTS have been stood up elsewhere in the US in the past several years (e.g. BCR in Minneapolis) with seemingly good results.
However, CAHOOTS is selectively dispatched by 911 and is only sent to a small percentage of situations which would otherwise overlap with police. (Most of their calls are more general assistance to the houseless folks/public where no police response would occur.) This is largely due to very strict “low-risk” criteria to not send police. This may be appropriate to protect all parties since CAHOOTS is not as equipped or qualified as other first responders — CAHOOTS only receives partial city funding, notably through the police department, and they are not equipped as EMTs/paramedics.
But this also means if you witness someone in crisis and call 911, you cannot be certain that CAHOOTS will show up and not the police, because as the article points out, 911 is set up to send police as the default and will likely do so whenever in doubt. This can clearly have life-or-death consequences for the person in crisis, and we won’t understand the full potential of these intervention teams until they are decoupled from the police and treated as peers with a discrete scope of responsibility.
I thankfully live, and worked as a paramedic, in a very progressive area of the country.
But still, sadly, I can relate multiple instances where we had a patient in MH crisis, who was doing well, until police not only arrived but actively escalated the situation.
Get called to an obviously mentally disturbed person who is agitated and such. Successfully talk to him over a period of time, calm him down, start a plan for getting him some assistance. And then had a cop march back over (who was on scene, saw the initial incident, the de-escalation), and start shouting at the patient over the destruction of property. The patient's property. "Who the fuck do you expect to clean up that broken glass? Selfish asshole. I should make _you_ get on your knees and clean it". Note that at the time, the patient's father was actually standing by with a trash can and a broom, ready to take care of exactly that.
End result? The patient who was compliant and willing to go for evaluation in the back of my ambulance needed to be sedated and narrowly avoided being tased. In the grand scheme of things, worse things have happened. But this was a situation actively under control. And a situation this officer, and only this officer, actively worked to make worse.
That incident resulted in a complaint, though I have no idea what the resolution was.
> police are by far the best equipped to keep responders and bystanders safe
Are they, though?
Increasingly, in the US, police are being trained to respond to any hint of danger with hair-trigger reflexes and lethal force. They are being taught to see themselves as constantly under siege, and every member of the public who's not a wealthy, able-bodied white person as a potential enemy, actively seeking to kill them.
If I knew there was someone with a mental illness nearby that made them sometimes violent and unpredictable, the person I would want around wouldn't be a police officer. It would be someone who's actually trained to interact with the mentally ill and de-escalate situations.
Sure, it might also be helpful to have someone who's physically strong enough to temporarily (safely) restrain the person having a psychotic episode, or a PTSD flashback, or just a plain old panic attack, to ensure they can't harm themselves or anyone around them while they are being helped.
But if someone has one of those kinds of problems, and I'm nearby, the last thing I want is for a heavily-armed member of the Aryan Brotherhood with a badge to shoot them dead and then boast about it online.
> It would be someone who's actually trained to interact with the mentally ill and de-escalate situations.
This is great when it works. But sometimes, people having mental health crises just don't want to be de-escalated, you try all the techniques and it doesn't work. (Just like with other medical calls—sometimes you do all the appropriate interventions, but the patient keeps getting sicker anyway.) Physical force should be the last resort, but sometimes there is unfortunately no other choice. (Source: I am an EMT)
Yes, that would make no sense, that's why it's not what I said.
It takes time for responders to arrive on scene. Even if police end up not usually not being needed, there can be value in calling for them ahead of time so that they are available in case they do end up being needed. On the other hand, their presence alone can cause issues even if they don't do anything. That's why it's a tough call
> Since 911’s inception in 1968, and even before, we have always defaulted to the police for things that really have nothing to do with crime.
I'm not sure why that should be surprising. For example, I'd expect the highway patrol to show up first at an accident. Maybe an ambulance or the fire department would be there too.
Yeah I'm not sure the alternative would be better. You will always have calls that don't fit neatly into the "crime" "fire" or "injury" buckets. Of the three of those whose time I would want to take up dealing with something in the margins it makes complete sense for it to be a police officer, if for no other reason than there are a lot more of them than there are paramedics or [professional] firefighters in most areas. Downstream of that the potential negatives of having 1-2 paramedics dealing with nonsense and unavailable for other calls seem much higher than the negatives of having 1-2 cops unavailable for some period of time.
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.
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.
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)
That’s certainly one possible way to address, at least when considering rural sheriffs or small-town police forces. But that kind of suggestion starts making people feel pretty uncomfortable in the US. Local control is better at convincing people that those empowered to police in their communities are accountable to local voters.
As with anything, of course it’s going to be partisan, too. NYC leftists don’t want Albany dictating how their police operate, and rural Californians don’t want the uniparty government in Sacramento controlling theirs.
“the problem shifts from the specifics of mental health and policing interactions to politics and getting elected.” +1. Another response to your comment mentions forces being small, which touches on a fundamental dynamic: Baumol-ian labor costs. As long as policing is defined as “an officer showing up” it will grow inexorably more expensive. Many HN commenters are foot soldiers in the effort to oppose automation in the form of cameras, drones, etc.
>the strongest consensus among experts is that police need more specializations, much like healthcare.
One of criticisms of healthcare is that we need more generalists so that people can afford basic checkups and routine care without obscene expenses. The call for more specialization might only serve some small minority of cases at wildly out-of-proportion rates.
Part of why policing seems so ineffective is because, whether or not it was deliberate, police forces have mutated into the "drug money confiscation force". Most people do not have active problems caused by or aggravated by drug dealers, and certainly not to the degree that would be indicated by how much police effort is expended toward those criminals. When real crimes are reported, we're told "tell it to your insurance company", the police never investigate, solve, or prosecute the people who commit those crimes.
there is a certain kind of mook (https://ribbonfarm.com/2020/01/16/the-internet-of-beefs/) out there: he finds a community in the United States, or who talks about communities they've never lived in in East Asia, like Singapore, or talks about communities that lack free press or elections and therefore verifiable statistics, like most of China, or are closed communities, like some of the EU, who says: "If we only did X like they do in community Y, there wouldn't be problems!" And what I am saying is, not that San Francisco does things well, but that the homeless problem in San Francisco is coming for those communities too. They are in San Francisco's past. Drugs are coming for those communities, the K shaped economy is coming for those communities, expensive OT-based compensation, a bloated public sector, falling commercial real estate, NIMBYism, private schooling, way too intensively used roads... Obviously, a lot of good stuff is coming too - Section 377A was only repealed in Singapore in 2022 - but my point is that nobody gets it right. They are just behind in a certain sense of getting it wrong.
To fix policing, you have to look at things like a Darwinian system, rather than looking for antagonists or agonizing over statistics.
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.
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.
Sure. But if you dial 110 by mistake and meant to dial 112, they will either help you regardless (many emergency dispatchers are colocated) or simply transfer you to where you meant to call.
From your description it sounds like 112 and 911 function more or less the same, you call and depending on the problem a dispatcher sends police, fire, or medical.
The issue described with 911 is that the dispatcher will default to the police for something like a mental health crisis which might escalate things to violence. The solution is to change how these calls are handled by the dispatchers and first responders. There already is a centralized number.
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).
Yes. This article’s main drive is that because organizationally the PD often (sometimes? Idk) runs the PSAP where calls are received, that they have a bias toward assuming a cop is the correct responder.
I actually disagree with this. The reason why people call police is that they know that the so-called “mental health crisis” is extremely dangerous, in a physical way, not just “emotionally triggering.” Like the dude I saw on the news in NYC last week who was lunging at the police with scissors who eventually ended up shot after the taser failed to get him to stop.
I guess people would like to believe that there’s an army of well-trained social workers out there who could be dispatched to the scene to simply talk someone down from a total psychotic episode, but the fact is that the type of person who’s going to be shot by the police would’ve also stabbed the social workers with scissors too.
The reality of the matter is that people who are severely mentally ill can be very dangerous to others. There’s not an easy way to guarantee they’ll never come to harm unless you’re willing to sacrifice the safety of everyone else by renouncing any possibility of using force.
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
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.
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.
That’s super cool of them. I guess fire is one of those things where jurisdiction doesn’t have to be exact. And with the lack of physical border there, they could easily just hop over and do their Dutch colleagues a favor.
Emergency services work cross border lots of times but I had never seen it in action. They were super fast too, far faster than I thought was even possible and their dutch colleagues weren't all that far behind. They managed to save the surrounding buildings but the building where the fire started was lost.
I mean they were possibly going to help anyway or even physically closer. And I imagine that sitting around in the fire department does get boring, something to do occasionally is welcome :)
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.
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.
It’s weird that that opinion occurred in a comment where they already knew about the reverse decision. It’s more of a case of pragmatism than cultural dominion.
I suppose they think that if America didn’t have so much cachet, that calls to 911 in Europe should route to a recording of someone chewing you out (in whatever the local language is) for being a cultural imperialist.
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).
Whoever is initially dispatched to the call by 911 also have a say. E.g. if 911 dispatches police, but the police feel they want an ambulance on scene as well, they can request that. And vice-versa.
There is a difficult balance to strike, in that police presence can escalate tension and make a situation worse, but police are also best equipped to protect other responders if a situation does escalate. It can be a tough judgment call
The article says the vast majority of places do not know where you are when you call 911; is that true?
I've toured our 911 call center, since I am a volunteer firefighter, and when you call on a cell phone you are immediately located by GPS and displayed on a map, and even tracked for a short time after you hang up.
And I would not expect Marion county Kansas to be up and coming technology-wise.
Unless it’s changed recently, Bay Area 911 calls all get routed to CHP in Vallejo and they didn’t have any information of where you are if calling from a cell phone.
Doesn’t seem fixed from a quick Google https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/cellphone-users-in-oak...
Maybe San Francisco should upgrade their tech to be on par with Kansas
And this is rural Kansas too, not Kansas City!
I’d be easier and more cost effective to move to a well managed state, and more likely to happen in human relevant time.
Which is the well managed state? Is California poorly managed?
SF can't tell where you are when you use a cell phone because the cell phone providers don't provide that information.
They don't in Kansas, either. I reported an accident on the highway last year and they weren't able to locate me based on my cellphone's GPS.
Speaking of well managed states...California is the world's 4th largest economy. The entire Red Belt combined is smaller than California's economy.
Wow, you need to subscribe to a $20 per year app for 911 to work from a cellphone in Oakland.
Perhaps its time to get them onto the ESINet with a modern SIP stack and dispatch console. You can only kick the can down the road so far, this is an upgrade that has been clearly needed for many years.
That news article is over ten years old.
Does anyone know if you have to have the GPS radio of the phone switched on for that to work? I keep my GPS and WIFI radios switched off for both privacy and to reduce the drain on the battery unless I specifically need it on when lost.
The OS overrides location service settings during emergency calls
> When using Emergency SOS to call emergency services, the call may include your location, regardless of whether you enable Location Services, to allow the dispatcher to assist you.
https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/emergency-sos/
Android has a similar feature.
There is no legislation requiring this of device (or OS) vendors, but carriers are legally required to make location information available to emergency services, and I think are even prohibited from connecting phones that don’t make this possible. So market forces effectively ensure that all phones do this.
The exception is when the call is too short to get a lock for GPS and location can’t be determined. The phone will still transmit what it can (say, WiFi proximity derived location). Worse case is fall through to carrier triangulation.
This is the correct answer.
There is no such thing as a GPS radio in a phone in the sense of something that broadcasts a signal. GPS signals are broadcast by satellites and any device on earth can choose to listen for the signal and triangulate their position by receiving the signal from multiple satellites. GPS doesn't send out any signal from your phone to work. In the same way that your eyeballs don't need to emit light for you to see (unless you're a superhero). Phones broadcast signal to connect to cell networks and wifi networks.
Now if you expect your phone to show your position on a map (using the GPS coordinates it calculated from the satellite signal) then it likely needs to retrieve map data from the internet (and in doing so it might be broadcasting over cell or wifi frequencies). But that's a different story.
Much confusion is caused by people saying "I tracked X with GPS" with the implication that GPS allows tracking of remote objects. It doesn't. It allows the remote object to know its own location. For that information to get to someone else (the spy in the chasing vehicle) the remote object needs to be broadcasting that location information through some other means (which has nothing to do with GPS).
I think most everyone but you interprets “GPS radio” in GP’s post to mean a “radio capable of reviving the GPS signal” same as I would call the thing in the middle of car’s dash an AM/FM radio.
>choose to listen for the signal
Devices need a radio receiver to be able to listen to and decode the signal. Without a radio it's impossible.
Short answer: no.
The network knows the signal strength between you and the cell towers nearest you. You are usually within range of more than one cell tower. That can locate you fairly accurately. Network data like this is used to augment GPS which can have problems among tall buildings for example.
Probably not, the network towers are the ones being used to triangulate I think.
That would be trilateration. But no, your phone is perfectly able to transfer your GPS position during a 911 call, as well.
The cell towers know where your phone is whenever it has signal. It's not as accurate as modern GPS, but 5G especially can locate you to within about a hundred meter radius. Precision varies wildly depending on conditions, distance, etc.
GPS is entirely passive (it is receive only), so leaving it on is harmless for your privacy on Apple devices. For Android... well, if you have an Android phone, you're not a privacy-conscious consumer by definition, so just leave it on for the convenience of not having to turn it on and off manually all the time!
WiFi, again, is not that big a deal with Apple because they rotate your unique MAC address to preserve your privacy. Android is a mixed bag, depends on the model of phone you purchased.
I believe it has to do with the age of the 911 system. Older systems do not support remote location, microphone and camera access.
Apparently the US 911 system integrated some Israeli tech from a company founded by Israeli intelligence personnel called Reporty Homeland Security that later rebranded as Carbyne. Carbyne was headed by former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak. The company, received much of its initial funding from Jeffery Epstein and Ehud Barak.
I don't know if any of the Israeli tech is running on handsets, but it is definitely running on the back-end in the US 911 emergency call systems. The on-device portion of the 911 emergency calling that grants remote access to location, video, and microphone is part of the closed, proprietary, Google Play Services, on Android.
If running a de-googled rom, you will presumably not be sending any location data or providing other access to your phone when calling 911.
Someone who is usually reliable stated that Scott Bessent had strong ties to this company, Ahud Barrak, and Jeffery Epstien (and was instrumental in getting Carbyne's tech adopted by US 911 system). But, I have not found evidence documenting Bessent's ties to Carbyne. If someone knows more about this-- either confirming or definitively refuting, please share.
It depends. There are two tiers of location tracking, and parts of it come down to E911, and cellular tower data. I could pull up dispatch on our MDTs (Tiburon) and see GPS coordinates and a confidence value and whether it was triangulation or direct location.
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/
Atlanta has it but our Mayoral administration has been hell-bent on rendering it useless: https://theappeal.org/atlanta-policing-alternatives-diversio...
I suspect Atlanta PD assumes the extremely meager budget (0.06%) for PAD is coming out of their very hefty cut of the city budget (30%+) and has been pushing against anything that smells like an alternative to their punitive model.
Eh, it's hit and miss. I've had complaints just get closed out with no action.
Also when calling for someone who may be in crisis, like someone sleeping on the street in too cold a weather, they kinda just bounce you to 911 iirc.
There is a difficult balance to strike in these types of calls (e.g. mental health crisis). On the one hand, the presence of police can escalate tensions and cause a situation to spiral out of control when it might not have otherwise. On the other hand, when a situation does get out of control, police are by far the best equipped to keep responders and bystanders safe. It can be a tough judgment call for responders to make
The Eugene CAHOOTS team has existed since 1989 until it was shut down recently. Dispatchers make the call as to whether or not to send police officers along with CAHOOTS responders on a per call basis.
Quoting vera.org: “ Of the estimated 24,000 calls CAHOOTS responded to in 2019, only 311 required police backup, and in Eugene, CAHOOTS teams resolved almost 20 percent of all calls coming through the city’s public safety communications center.”
To the best of my knowledge, no CAHOOTS staff have died or been seriously injured on the job. I’m not sure the evidence shows that finding the right balance is dangerous. Hard for sure, CAHOOTS put a lot of effort into building the right relationship with the police, but the risk to responders is overstated.
I lived in Eugene previously and CAHOOTS is (seems they are still operating in Springfield) quite effective in the limited response work they do, particularly de-escalation and triage of mental health crises. These are classic situations that (American) police are not needed nor are most properly trained for, and several crisis intervention teams modelled after CAHOOTS have been stood up elsewhere in the US in the past several years (e.g. BCR in Minneapolis) with seemingly good results.
However, CAHOOTS is selectively dispatched by 911 and is only sent to a small percentage of situations which would otherwise overlap with police. (Most of their calls are more general assistance to the houseless folks/public where no police response would occur.) This is largely due to very strict “low-risk” criteria to not send police. This may be appropriate to protect all parties since CAHOOTS is not as equipped or qualified as other first responders — CAHOOTS only receives partial city funding, notably through the police department, and they are not equipped as EMTs/paramedics.
But this also means if you witness someone in crisis and call 911, you cannot be certain that CAHOOTS will show up and not the police, because as the article points out, 911 is set up to send police as the default and will likely do so whenever in doubt. This can clearly have life-or-death consequences for the person in crisis, and we won’t understand the full potential of these intervention teams until they are decoupled from the police and treated as peers with a discrete scope of responsibility.
I thankfully live, and worked as a paramedic, in a very progressive area of the country.
But still, sadly, I can relate multiple instances where we had a patient in MH crisis, who was doing well, until police not only arrived but actively escalated the situation.
Get called to an obviously mentally disturbed person who is agitated and such. Successfully talk to him over a period of time, calm him down, start a plan for getting him some assistance. And then had a cop march back over (who was on scene, saw the initial incident, the de-escalation), and start shouting at the patient over the destruction of property. The patient's property. "Who the fuck do you expect to clean up that broken glass? Selfish asshole. I should make _you_ get on your knees and clean it". Note that at the time, the patient's father was actually standing by with a trash can and a broom, ready to take care of exactly that.
End result? The patient who was compliant and willing to go for evaluation in the back of my ambulance needed to be sedated and narrowly avoided being tased. In the grand scheme of things, worse things have happened. But this was a situation actively under control. And a situation this officer, and only this officer, actively worked to make worse.
That incident resulted in a complaint, though I have no idea what the resolution was.
> police are by far the best equipped to keep responders and bystanders safe
Are they, though?
Increasingly, in the US, police are being trained to respond to any hint of danger with hair-trigger reflexes and lethal force. They are being taught to see themselves as constantly under siege, and every member of the public who's not a wealthy, able-bodied white person as a potential enemy, actively seeking to kill them.
If I knew there was someone with a mental illness nearby that made them sometimes violent and unpredictable, the person I would want around wouldn't be a police officer. It would be someone who's actually trained to interact with the mentally ill and de-escalate situations.
Sure, it might also be helpful to have someone who's physically strong enough to temporarily (safely) restrain the person having a psychotic episode, or a PTSD flashback, or just a plain old panic attack, to ensure they can't harm themselves or anyone around them while they are being helped.
But if someone has one of those kinds of problems, and I'm nearby, the last thing I want is for a heavily-armed member of the Aryan Brotherhood with a badge to shoot them dead and then boast about it online.
> It would be someone who's actually trained to interact with the mentally ill and de-escalate situations.
This is great when it works. But sometimes, people having mental health crises just don't want to be de-escalated, you try all the techniques and it doesn't work. (Just like with other medical calls—sometimes you do all the appropriate interventions, but the patient keeps getting sicker anyway.) Physical force should be the last resort, but sometimes there is unfortunately no other choice. (Source: I am an EMT)
> Physical force should be the last resort, but sometimes there is unfortunately no other choice.
It makes no sense to have "first responders" who default to your "last resort".
"OK, so, we think there's a typo in one of the customer records so I've restored from this morning's backup"
"But that loses six hours of work! That's crazy, why did you do that?"
"Restoring from backup is our last resort"
"What else did you try?"
"Oh I never try anything else. I just restore from backup and that resolves it"
Yes, that would make no sense, that's why it's not what I said.
It takes time for responders to arrive on scene. Even if police end up not usually not being needed, there can be value in calling for them ahead of time so that they are available in case they do end up being needed. On the other hand, their presence alone can cause issues even if they don't do anything. That's why it's a tough call
They don't need to arrive on the scene with sirens blasting, tyres smoking, guns in hand.
Approach without blue lights, potentially park round the corner and wait until requested.
I'm really hopeful we don't take Euro advice on how to police.
> Since 911’s inception in 1968, and even before, we have always defaulted to the police for things that really have nothing to do with crime.
I'm not sure why that should be surprising. For example, I'd expect the highway patrol to show up first at an accident. Maybe an ambulance or the fire department would be there too.
Yeah I'm not sure the alternative would be better. You will always have calls that don't fit neatly into the "crime" "fire" or "injury" buckets. Of the three of those whose time I would want to take up dealing with something in the margins it makes complete sense for it to be a police officer, if for no other reason than there are a lot more of them than there are paramedics or [professional] firefighters in most areas. Downstream of that the potential negatives of having 1-2 paramedics dealing with nonsense and unavailable for other calls seem much higher than the negatives of having 1-2 cops unavailable for some period of time.
Obligatory: <https://mudcompany.thecomicseries.com/comics/148/#content-st...>
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.
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.
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)
That’s certainly one possible way to address, at least when considering rural sheriffs or small-town police forces. But that kind of suggestion starts making people feel pretty uncomfortable in the US. Local control is better at convincing people that those empowered to police in their communities are accountable to local voters.
As with anything, of course it’s going to be partisan, too. NYC leftists don’t want Albany dictating how their police operate, and rural Californians don’t want the uniparty government in Sacramento controlling theirs.
Thanks for the book recommendation.
“the problem shifts from the specifics of mental health and policing interactions to politics and getting elected.” +1. Another response to your comment mentions forces being small, which touches on a fundamental dynamic: Baumol-ian labor costs. As long as policing is defined as “an officer showing up” it will grow inexorably more expensive. Many HN commenters are foot soldiers in the effort to oppose automation in the form of cameras, drones, etc.
>the strongest consensus among experts is that police need more specializations, much like healthcare.
One of criticisms of healthcare is that we need more generalists so that people can afford basic checkups and routine care without obscene expenses. The call for more specialization might only serve some small minority of cases at wildly out-of-proportion rates.
Part of why policing seems so ineffective is because, whether or not it was deliberate, police forces have mutated into the "drug money confiscation force". Most people do not have active problems caused by or aggravated by drug dealers, and certainly not to the degree that would be indicated by how much police effort is expended toward those criminals. When real crimes are reported, we're told "tell it to your insurance company", the police never investigate, solve, or prosecute the people who commit those crimes.
I'm honestly amazed someone could point to San Francisco's homeless problem and its policing or lack thereof and say "that's the future"
there is a certain kind of mook (https://ribbonfarm.com/2020/01/16/the-internet-of-beefs/) out there: he finds a community in the United States, or who talks about communities they've never lived in in East Asia, like Singapore, or talks about communities that lack free press or elections and therefore verifiable statistics, like most of China, or are closed communities, like some of the EU, who says: "If we only did X like they do in community Y, there wouldn't be problems!" And what I am saying is, not that San Francisco does things well, but that the homeless problem in San Francisco is coming for those communities too. They are in San Francisco's past. Drugs are coming for those communities, the K shaped economy is coming for those communities, expensive OT-based compensation, a bloated public sector, falling commercial real estate, NIMBYism, private schooling, way too intensively used roads... Obviously, a lot of good stuff is coming too - Section 377A was only repealed in Singapore in 2022 - but my point is that nobody gets it right. They are just behind in a certain sense of getting it wrong.
To fix policing, you have to look at things like a Darwinian system, rather than looking for antagonists or agonizing over statistics.
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.
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.
Sure. But if you dial 110 by mistake and meant to dial 112, they will either help you regardless (many emergency dispatchers are colocated) or simply transfer you to where you meant to call.
Oh great, because in Germany it's exactly the other way around. 110 is police, 112 is firefighters and ambulance.
>>That they default more to the police is a completely different issue.
That is literally what this article is about though, no?
From your description it sounds like 112 and 911 function more or less the same, you call and depending on the problem a dispatcher sends police, fire, or medical.
The issue described with 911 is that the dispatcher will default to the police for something like a mental health crisis which might escalate things to violence. The solution is to change how these calls are handled by the dispatchers and first responders. There already is a centralized number.
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).
Yes. This article’s main drive is that because organizationally the PD often (sometimes? Idk) runs the PSAP where calls are received, that they have a bias toward assuming a cop is the correct responder.
I actually disagree with this. The reason why people call police is that they know that the so-called “mental health crisis” is extremely dangerous, in a physical way, not just “emotionally triggering.” Like the dude I saw on the news in NYC last week who was lunging at the police with scissors who eventually ended up shot after the taser failed to get him to stop.
I guess people would like to believe that there’s an army of well-trained social workers out there who could be dispatched to the scene to simply talk someone down from a total psychotic episode, but the fact is that the type of person who’s going to be shot by the police would’ve also stabbed the social workers with scissors too.
The reality of the matter is that people who are severely mentally ill can be very dangerous to others. There’s not an easy way to guarantee they’ll never come to harm unless you’re willing to sacrifice the safety of everyone else by renouncing any possibility of using force.
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
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.
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.
That’s super cool of them. I guess fire is one of those things where jurisdiction doesn’t have to be exact. And with the lack of physical border there, they could easily just hop over and do their Dutch colleagues a favor.
Emergency services work cross border lots of times but I had never seen it in action. They were super fast too, far faster than I thought was even possible and their dutch colleagues weren't all that far behind. They managed to save the surrounding buildings but the building where the fire started was lost.
I mean they were possibly going to help anyway or even physically closer. And I imagine that sitting around in the fire department does get boring, something to do occasionally is welcome :)
> I mean they were possibly going to help anyway or even physically closer.
There is a good chance of that.
The fire was in Eygelshoven, Nievelsteenstraat. I don't know how close the nearest fire stations are either side of the border.
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.
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.
> American cultural dominance has made it so everyone knows 911 and even Europeans apparently end up dialing it.
This is a ridiculous opinion.
It’s weird that that opinion occurred in a comment where they already knew about the reverse decision. It’s more of a case of pragmatism than cultural dominion.
I suppose they think that if America didn’t have so much cachet, that calls to 911 in Europe should route to a recording of someone chewing you out (in whatever the local language is) for being a cultural imperialist.
999 works in most places, too.
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).
Whoever is initially dispatched to the call by 911 also have a say. E.g. if 911 dispatches police, but the police feel they want an ambulance on scene as well, they can request that. And vice-versa.
There is a difficult balance to strike, in that police presence can escalate tension and make a situation worse, but police are also best equipped to protect other responders if a situation does escalate. It can be a tough judgment call
They reroute you to nonemergency where a female dispatcher chuckles at your very real problem so crime stats stay low?