Rich Sims <rich@pro-exchange.cts.com> (07/27/90)
While this is *not* intended to excuse incompetence or just plain stupidity, the 911 service is not as bad as some of the recent comments would indicate. Consider ... people tend to remember and relate the things that go wrong, not the ones that go right ... which the vast majority of 911 calls appear to do! The system isn't perfect, but then, it was designed by, and is implemented by, less than perfect creatures ... human beings. It is not now, and never will be a 100% infallible system. There will always be the possibility of getting an operator who is new to the job, poorly or incompletely trained, moderately incompetent, overworked, or any of a multitude of other problems. Even if everything works out perfectly on the call, the response may be less than what was desired or necessary, again for one (or several) of a large number of reasons. Unfortunately, the result of any of this is frequently tragic. The system isn't perfect, but it does work, most of the time. As with any other system involving the interaction of several people in a high-stress situation, there are going to be some screw-ups. The best we can hope for is that the respective participants in such screw-ups learn from the problems, and take the necessary steps to improve the response the next time around. Of course, one of those "necessary steps" is to make the facts known, so others can also learn from such cases. However, I suspect that not many of the people actually involved in handling 911 calls are reading this group!
gmp@rayssd.ssd.ray.com (Gregory M. Paris) (07/30/90)
Just to relate a single incident where E911 seemed to work nicely: My
wife (fiancee at the time) dialed 911 in Providence, RI. I got the
impression that as soon as she said she wanted police, patrol cars
were dispatched -- before the specifics of the problem were determined
by the 911 operator. In fact, my wife was getting anxious answering
the questions of the operator, yet four Providence Police cars
containing eight officers surrounded the house just ten seconds after
she hung up the phone. Total response time was less than one minute.
I do not believe that the response could have been as quick if the
call had been made to the police number; the "extended" aspect of the
911 service seemed to save quite a bit of time.
Greg Paris <gmp@quahog.ssd.ray.com>
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