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...

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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)

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"

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.

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).

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.

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).