Abuse of 911, a Vital Link

About 2 million calls were placed to 911 in San Diego County last year, the fifth year for the sophisticated telephone network. The system is designed to give callers quicker access to police, fire and medical services in emergencies, but it’s not foolproof. It can get bogged down by citizens who fool around with it.

And the number who do is astonishing. A one-day study by the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department found that only 42% of the calls to 911 were legitimate emergencies. Of the rest, 23% were non-emergency police calls, 22% were callers who misdialed or hung up, 8% were people seeking miscellaneous information, and 5% were children playing with the phone.

San Diego police report similar figures, which California statistics indicate are common to big cities.

Many calls come from citizens alarmed by fireworks at Sea World, artillery at Camp Pendleton or earthquakes.

But other non-emergency calls are less defensible: requests for weather forecasts, for directions to the stadium and for instructions on where to pay an electric bill.

On an emergency line? And in an era of shrinking resources for all government services? San Diego may be a big city, but some residents apparently still expect small-town service.

The frivolous calls don’t constitute a major problem; police are used to dealing with them.

But they become a problem when a 911 operator is delayed and another caller needs an officer, paramedic or firefighter immediately, or when there are so many of them that dialing 911 results in a busy signal. A few-second delay can be an eternity for someone in crisis and, conceivably, could mean the difference between life and death.

The number of “legitimate” calls is higher in smaller communities, in part because they use a more lenient definition of emergency, officials say. A small city’s police department is likely to dispatch an officer to check out a suspicious person in the neighborhood, children skateboarding in the street or a snake in someone’s house.

The volume of 911 calls in big cities--San Diego received 1.6 million calls last year--militates against such generous responses. In larger cities, 911 should be reserved for situations in which a person’s life is in danger or when a crime is in progress, police say.

The 911 service is a valuable, often lifesaving, resource. It is too easy to take it for granted or to allow a momentary lapse into laziness to tie up a vital link with emergency help.