Nuisance, non-emergency calls often made to 911

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By Kurt Allemeier | Monday, May 7, 2007 9:39 AM CDT | () comments

When they should be taking calls for car crashes, burglaries and deaths, 911 dispatchers occasionally have to field calls asking for the time, how bridge traffic is and what day is garbage pick-up.

Although 911 is intended for emergencies only, dispatchers often must deal with the mundane and annoying. The troublesome and time-consuming nuisance calls rarely result in an arrest, but police say a Davenport man recently went too far.

The 26-year-old man was arrested and faces a misdemeanor charge after making a barrage of 911 calls to Davenport police, dialing 911 10 times within a matter of hours.

Officers responded to the man’s residence three times. Officers were dispatched when the first call for assistance was made, but when they arrived, the man told the officers he did not need help.

Nine 911 hang-up calls followed, according to police. The man was told several times not to call back unless he had an emergency. When officers went to the man’s house twice more, he refused to open the door.

He also called the department’s regular dispatch line twice and called an officer’s cell phone three times.

Davenport police receive 99,000 dispatch calls each year. To make an arrest for a nuisance 911 call is a rarity, police Capt. David Struckman said.

“After you warn them, it usually stops, but every once in a while, you make an arrest,” he said. “It doesn’t happen that often.”

Police follow a process so that one nuisance 911 phone call doesn’t turn into a stream of calls.

“They will be warned initially,” Rock Island police Capt. Donald Reichert said. “We send an officer to talk to them about unnecessary harassment, then we will make an arrest.

“If a person is agitated, you are trying to work through a problem with them. It takes longer than other 911 calls, and if it is busy on the street, you have to resolve that call and also handle other calls that bounce back in.”

Rock Island dispatches an officer to abandoned 911 calls. An abandoned cell phone call gets a call back from dispatchers.

“Cell phone hang-ups are the most concerning because you don’t know where they are,” Rock Island dispatcher Jan Green said.

Bettendorf dispatchers often get nuisance calls asking how traffic is on the Interstate 74 bridge, and as July 4 nears, callers want to know when the fireworks display is.

“When the city first instituted 911, the city told people to call on anything,” Billie Huffman, a longtime Bettendorf dispatcher, said. “It is any silly thing you could think about.

“People never got out of the habit.”

People on cell phones also make nuisance calls, but they usually are made by accident or by misdialing. When a traffic accident happens, a dispatch center often gets flooded with calls.

“We have to respond to all of those to make sure they aren’t individual incidents,” Huffman said.

Kurt Allemeier can be contacted at (563) 383-2360 or kallemeier@qctimes.com.

SOME INQUIRIES THAT OPERATORS HAVE RECEIVED

“What time is it?”

“Can you tell me what day of the week it is?”

“This isn’t an emergency ...”

“How is the (Interstate 74) bridge?”

“When is my garbage pick-up?”