I am not sure when, in Canada, 911 became the number to call
when there is an emergency. I have no memory of when I was younger of anyone
ever mentioning calling any number other than "0" to get help. I can vaguely
remember being in class at college in Toronto in the early 1970s and someone
being surprised that I didn't know about it. It was as if something all of a
sudden existed.
If one can trust Goggle, it says that it was 1968 before the
US had any single system. I assume Canada developed something about the same
time. I suspect that until there were only a few telephone companies and some
sort of automated system, it would have been challenging to create a national
system. It is hard to imagine the system working with a lot of small companies
- each with their individual operators.
Regardless of when I first learnt of the system, I know that
no one ever suggested that one should call 911 to ask for help in seeing if
someone was okay. The instructions were clear -only call 911 if there has been
an accident, if there was a fire or if someone is sick. I am sure that I knew I
could use 911 to call the police if I saw a crime being committed but I cannot
ever have imagined doing so. Quite simply, if you called 911, you had better
have a damn good reason.
In the last 50 years, things have changed. We no longer see 911 as the call of the last resort - it what we do when we think something bad is happening and we either don't know what to do or we don't want to be involved. It is surprisingly difficult to find statistics of the frequency of use but in 2018, in the USA, there were an estimated 240 million 911 calls made (1). The most recent statistic on use in Canada that I could find was from 2008. The Globe and Mail that year reported that there were approximately 12 million 922 calls made (2). That is a lot of calls. If in fact, every one of them requires some sort a face-to-face response, that is a lot of person-hours! I could find no statistic on how many of those calls were for ambulance or fire services or to the police. It would seem to me that we need those statistics. We need to determine who is using the 911 service and why.
I do not doubt that at least some of the people who are calling
911 are doing so because they do not know who else to call. But the dispatchers
have limited options as to how to direct the caller. They are not counsellors
and cannot tell the caller to talk to someone else. Everyone's job within the
911 system is to assume that it is an emergency. I suspect that this system has
encouraged some people to, at the very least, slightly exaggerate the nature of
the crisis so that help is sent sooner. It must very difficult for the
dispatcher to do any sort of triage to determine priorities.
Given the recent dramatic examples of the police mishandling calls to assist someone who may be at risk to themselves, there may finally be enough public and political pressure to address the issue. But before we invest too much energy in looking at ways of defunding some of the police services budgets it would be useful to look at who is calling and for what services. How many of those 12 million-plus calls were related to mental health or behavioural issues? What were the outcomes?
It is quite clear (at least to me) that for the most part, utilizing police officers to assist people who are not criminals or who have not been hurt by criminals is a poor use of the resource. But the issues as to who should help, how would they be trained, who would monitor their responses can be best addressed when we know what the job will be.
And of course, we have to be prepared to pay for it.
(1) www.nena.org
› page › 911Statistics
