When You Dial 911 and Wall Street Answers
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I don't know whether this myth was ever true, but it certainly is not true today.
I have called 911 or its equivalent more than a dozen times on three continents. No magic helping people appear within five minutes. Or ten. Usually not twenty either. Sometimes not at all, even when they say they will come.
We pay fees for E911 service which includes location of cellular phones. But if you call 911 in Manhattan and tell them you are on 4th Street they will ask you if it's East or West 4th. They will even ask you this if you say you're on 3rd Avenue--an absurd question for a local resident but not for 911 dispatchers who are not locals and do not know local vernacular much less geography.
A few days ago the car I was in was robbed while we were driving in Chicago. I immediately called 911. They said they'd send someone so I told them where to find the driver. They called me back 20 minutes later and said they were not coming and that such a crime could be reported by phone only. The driver's phone had been stolen.
A fire alarm went off in a commercial building. I called 911. They didn't show up. Forty minutes later I called again. They sent the FD to my house. Not the fire.
911 is broken. Be prepared to take care of yourself.
The other time I called 911 from roughly the same location, the call only rang. I hung up after probably 10-20 rings. [I woke up to the building next to my windows engulfed in 15+ foot flames. I setup the call while evacuating, but cancelled it once we began leaving the building. Made it outside and there were already many engines deployed and actively fighting.]
It's a not-excellently-paid job that is extremely stressful. It's extremely traumatic to hear someone dying, begging you for their life, and not being able to help (if, say, the location info fails and they don't know where they are). Add in low funding, and there can be long waits.
Location info sometimes fails, so it's ALWAYS a good idea to confirm location. In Canada an operator failed to do so, dispatched medical aid to the wrong location, and a kid died.
As to poor response in your experiments, I don't think that accurately represents the situation for everyone. It heavily depends on where you are and how busy they are. Certainly many people get very fast response times. 911 saves a huge amount of lives every year.
I've been in other countries that really don't have 9-1-1. First thing you notice is that every house is a mini-fortress. In Guatemala, I have a 24/7 rotation of guards, at least 4 all time. Because if an attack isn't prevented, there's going to be no helpful response. 911 is an amazing service and the lack of it is acutely noticed.
Kidding aside, thank you for the thoughtful post.
I've lived in loosely-gated communities, and the sense of security is just far less. Here I don't mind walking around at 2am -- there's simply zero crime inside the area. I don't even lock my doors sometimes. (There's cameras covering every part of the community.)
We have about 400 houses, each paying about $30 a month for security and commons/park maintenance. A guard makes $400 a month.
It's a nice place to visit. Geography is great. But the constant brokenness of everything just wears you down. The pervasive violence also just adds a pall over everything. I think a lot of people just sort of give up on the place -- things don't really change. It's not just corrupt (who cares if someone takes money), it's just sheer incompetence all around. I mean this at every single level. From government, to doctors, to people building basic structures with no planning/engineering.
I truly believe countries like these only have hope if a serious country comes in an runs the place.
For the past 30 years all around the world all cities are safer than ever. I don't see the catastrophic situation than you describe.
In any case if corporations are taking over basic services is a political issue that should be solved in elections and with political action.
"Be prepared to take care of yourself." is the wrong approach as it just asks people to renounce to their rights. You should defend your rights not happily renounce them.
Yeah, I think I remember reading that heart attack outcomes improved "a lot," so long ago that it's just an assumption I have by now. It's better with 911 than without (along with all the other improvements in first response).
911 may have a local component and it could be your city being slow.
911 is very much a local service, with significant variation from place to place.
If someone is asking clarifying details it's likely because they are trained to do so, as people in real life emergencies tend to get flustered and make mistakes.
The 911 system in NYC is sophisticated, was revamped by the Bloomberg administration heavily in the wake of September 11th, and is very much part of the civil service here. Your story about calling 911 in NYC and getting an out of town call center is obvious fiction and makes me doubt the rest of your stories as a result.
You sound very sure of yourself, but telephony is pretty damn complex and there are lots of strange things that happen in telephone call routing. Maybe if that guy has a cell number from another city or a foreign country, or with a certain carrier that doesn't comply with all the requirements of E911, or there are obscure bugs in the routing system, it'll get routed to a non-NYC call center. Are you sure that never happens?
There is real number you can dial instead, which I've stored in my phone and allows me to dial the SF 911 center directly.
Luckily I haven't needed it for more than a brush fire. This might be true in other states as well.
But I also worked in that industry for a while and thats not going to happen anytime soon by the looks of it
http://lubbockonline.com/stories/020299/LA0689.shtml#.V2_jIp...
As an anecdote, I was once dispatched to an unconscious elderly female with a head injury after a 10' fall. This is obviously a fairly serious, time critical situation.
We arrived at the dispatched address, and found a man who was seriously confused as to why an ambulance crew was pounding on his door.
Turns out, the call was actually on the opposite end of our response area. The woman had been found on the ground by a delivery driver, and in his excitement, he pulled out his clipboard and mistakenly read the address of his last delivery.
Obviously the call taker would have no way of knowing that, and accurately dispatched us to the address that was reported. It just goes to show how easy it is for someone calling 911 to make a mistake, and how critical it is for call takers to do as much as they can to verify the location of the incident.
I worked at a telco for 4 years, one of our "responsibilities" was to supply the government daily with "the 911 dump" which is a mapping of all phone numbers to physical addresses for reverse lookup.
From experience, I can tell you it would often go many weeks of script failures with nobody noticing, and in any given dumps there were hundreds of addresses that were wrong and incoherent. Telco is a numbers game. When you're dealing with millions of entries, a couple of percent are always garbage.
As you may know, there is a law that New York City employees must be residents. However, I once lived in an apartment used by multiple firefighters as their residential address, but who did not actually live there. Rent in NYC is expensive, city employee salaries are not generally very high, and so people do cheat by paying a small amount of money for a place to use as a mailing address (or even sleep occasionally).
Another story from NYC 911: I called to report live exposed electrical wiring in a sidewalk shed on a busy street. The British call this a hoarding, and out-of-towners often don't know the term, but it's sufficiently well-known in NYC that the NY Times uses it in headlines: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/25/nyregion/the-sidewalk-shed...
The dispatcher had no idea what a "sidewalk shed" was. I explained what it was in some detail, after which the dispatcher still didn't get it, and thought I was talking about a shed like you'd have behind your house in the suburbs. This person may well have been working in Brooklyn, but surely hadn't lived there any length of time. Indeed the city employee residency law doesn't require any "warm up" period--you can move in any time within the first 90 days of your employment.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/25/nyregion/the-sidewalk-shed...
The New York Times has lived in NYC for over 160 years.
I had an outright "please come right away" emergency with my kid, and an ambulance came right away.
I've called about suspicious activity in the neighborhood, and the sheriff came right away.
I even called because someone stole the registration tag from my car and taped it on their car (a neighbor living in the same apartment building) and they showed up, not at emergency speed but way before I would have been pissed.
The ambulance is part of the fire department here (and often it's a firetruck that shows up before the ambulance, all the same people). And we're not nuts like Chicago apparently is.
EDIT:
> Be prepared to take care of yourself.
I agree with that 100%.
Why is that an unreasonable question? People calling in emergencies are generally stressed and often very bad at accurately communicating where they are. A few clarifying questions, even if they don't make sense to you, can go a long way towards verifying the information they're being given.
> They will even ask you this if you say you're on 3rd Avenue
"4th street and 3rd ave" is a unique identifier. The East/West part is only relevant if you give the street + a house number, with no cross-street.
I'm not sure if the op used it as an example for this reason or am I being overly pedantic but... there it is.
Remember that not everyone who calls 911 in New York City is a local. In fact, given the tourism in the city, I suspect a large fraction of 911 calls are from non-locals (a local is gonna walk right past a drunk sleeping on a bench... a visitor might call it in as a "person down").
Verifying the location of an emergency is literally step 0 in dealing with it. Spending 10 seconds asking some "dumb" questions to rule out confusions that have come up in the past can save a significant amount of time overall.
Two weeks ago I called 911 after hearing a loud car crash within a few blocks of my apartment. Took out my phone, placed the call, and listened to music for ~6 minutes before I was able to talk to someone. Once the 911 dispatcher took all of the information I had, the call was transferred (another ~3 minute wait). The original dispatcher introduced herself to my local dispatcher as "911 north".
FWIW, this is a city in the top 30 by population.
We had neighbors who'd set bonfires under trees during all hours of the day and night in the middle of the forest. It may sound stupid to call for that reason, but if you're familiar with wildfires and how often they're started by human factors here in the southwest, you may be somewhat sympathetic.
I remember one circumstance a few years ago during the dry season at the very start of our monsoons where lightning had caused a transformer across the highway to explode and catch fire. I don't know who called it in first, but they were there within about 5 minutes followed shortly thereafter by the electric coop.
I'm sure there's circumstances counter to this, but we've always had fantastic experiences and donate to our VFD.
In what other countries did you try?
I called 911 in Canada many times as a ski patroller, and EMS were always on the way in less than 1 minute.
In Australia, when my Grandfather had a heart attack and teenage me had to call the equivalent (000), the ambulance was there extremely quickly (coming from a town about 12km away).
My wife (among others) called 911 when neighbors were held up in front of their house across the was last December. The police were there in about 5 minutes. Somebody on the street called the police a couple of years ago upon hearing an explosion in one of the houses. The police were there very quickly, found a fire, and summoned the fire department, which also arrived quickly.
Be prepared to take care of myself? I am somewhat trained in rendering first aid, but have no experience in standing on a cherry-picker while operating a fire hose. I have discharged a firearm, but at no time recently, and don't think I would add to public safety by hunting armed robbers.
> Private equity gained new power and responsibility as a direct result of the 2008 crisis. As cities and towns nationwide struggled to pay for basics like public infrastructure and ambulance services, private equity stepped in.
The budgets of state and local governments around the country are tapped out. Often, that's the result of problems that--though exacerbated by the financial collapse--have been in the making for decades.
The relevant question isn't whether private-equity backed police and fire services are better than well-funded public ones.[1] It's whether they're better than the poorly funded or unfunded ones that states and municipalities are able to afford given their budget constraints.
[1] Not only is that not the relevant question--it's one the article does not even answer. Nowhere does it provide any concrete analysis of the performance of private versus public fire or ambulance services.
Frankly, this story seems to be "terribly run towns that mismanaged their way almost into bankruptcy and can no longer afford to provide critical services are also terrible at negotiating other contracts too!" Which, you know...yeah?
Often it's the result of one party drastically cutting services and revenue, and taking the radical position that taxes, especially income taxes, can never go up.
Is one typically billed when you have the fire department arrive? I thought it was a public good.
If you choose to live in such a place, be prepared to be completely self sufficient.
These towns are required by federal law to provide school service to children within them, however, anything else like police, fire, and ambulance services are not required.
I think it's truly a shame that this has led to predatory practices by private companies who charge "fire insurance" rates of $500 a year, and charge exorbitant rates to people who might innocently dial 911 while their house is burning and don't have insurance.
For what it's worth, this is not normal practice in most civilized parts of the US (pretty much anywhere on the east and west coasts), but if you get far enough into the poor rural southern states, it really is like a 3rd world country.
Much of the interior of the US could be described as civilized...
I don't really understand this, although my hunch is it has roots in feelings of intellectual superiority.
As well as good old fashioned, 'fear of people with different values and culture than your own'
He starts off with "Wow! That must have be tough growing up as an Indian in Georgia! Those guys are so backward."
My friend replies "Actually, I had a great childhood. Never had any problems being Indian. Georgia is a great place to grow up."
Of course the guy from SF had never actually been to Georgia.
These are the same people who would bristle if you said something bad about people in another country and say "How do you know? You can't understand a place by reading about it in the newspaper."
If a person is considering ideas (especially political ideas) then they might view those ideas as being held by a person like themself. Some ideas are very easy to picture being held by a very similar person (e.g. spicy food), but the more complex the idea (e.g. Trexit) the more difficult it becomes to conceive of the mindset that the similar person would need to have in order to have reached the differing conclusion.
The key here is that it's not really about a differing mindset, so much as different circumstances that construct the differing mindset. This, I assert, is very difficult to account for completely without simply accepting all views at face value as both perfectly valid and a complete mystery, unknowable outside each person's mind.
As such, it is inconceivable to the person who thinks they understand both the issues at hand and the mind of the relevant populace to reach a conclusion that contradicts the logical consequences of the (broken) assumptions, and thus the conclusion is that the one who holds such opinions is an illogical dunce, and unacceptable in this rational age. In actuality the assumptions are broken in a subtle way such that it is easy to miss the leap made to broad-brush painting.
Two, people tend to accumulate objects of sentimental value. Your great grandfather's watch (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFtHjV4c4uw) might be priceless to you and only worth $50 to an insurance company.
Both are actually, in some sense, the same thing. Both are costs which you will pay instead of your insurance company. Because they don't pay those costs, their assesments of the costs of a fire will be off. Thus they will let some houses burn which optimally, would not burn.
However, my underlying point was really that it does make rational sense to allow some houses to burn. We could put a fireman on every street, and we'd probably save a lot of houses, lives, and heirlooms. But that would prohibitively expensive. Instead, we have to engage in trade-offs, having cheaper fire protection at the cost of risking some houses, lives, and heirlooms.
Where are you getting your definition of rational? Are you saying you can assign a fair, total ordering of value to every thing?
But we'd still save more lives, houses, and heirlooms if we did put one on every street. Every additional kilometer between my house and the fire station increases the level of risk for my house. My point is: it's not binary: you have fire protection or you don't. You have varying degrees of fire protection quality with varying degrees of cost and you have pick the one you want.
> Where are you getting your definition of rational? Are you saying you can assign a fair, total ordering of value to every thing?
No, I certainly hold to the subjective theory of value which rejects the idea that there is an objective fair total ordering of value.
By rational, I mean its a decision that makes sense given your subjective valuation. You aren't going to reduce the risk as much as possible because that would be far too expensive. You are going to choose a level of risk that in your estimation trades off expensive and risk in an acceptable manner. That's subjective, and will vary from person to person, but no matter what your decision is, you will end up having some risk that you could have gotten rid of it, if you were willing to pay for it.
I want to be clear. Is this actually the question you're asking?
But in the case postulated above, you aren't paying the company to protect your house from fire. You are paying the company as an insurance company. Fire protection is just something they do in order to reduce their losses.
Also, it is not likely they would simply decide not to protect your house. It is more likely they would have fewer fire stations, older equipment, etc that puts your house at a higher risk then you prefer.
But my point really was: regardless of who does it, some houses will end burning because it was too expensive to save them.
It does sound awful not to have access to fire service to someone like me who is used to it,* but then again, have the company done anything wrong by offering the service? Starting no company at all and offering no service at all would have been acceptable, right? I mean, that's what most of us do. Then, is there really anything wrong with offering people a service, even at a high price, if you don't take away any alternative they already had (which in this case would be to let the house burn)?
* I haven't actually ever used the service, but I count on that they will come if I call. I count on the fire department coming more than I do the police, because if there's a fire, other people's stuff and lives are on the line. When it's just about me, I'm not as sure that I am considered worth the cost. For the record, I'm in Europe.
They have great diversification. In some locations they have monopoly. If you need immediate help (you see or are member of accident, you have strong pain no matter where (head, teeth, back)) you have almost no choice. You are still calling emergency and/or paying to one pocket.
From one side, public hospital all very old and incredibly indebted, outdated medical devices, buildings are old and need renovation. Mentioned corp invested huge amount of money in renovation, improving environment and business process. People have better services and new private hospitals has very good financial health and level of customer services.
On the other hand, very sad thing is that public representatives are able only talk about nothing and perform reformation feasibility studies and studies about studies. They are not able to get needed public services to desired level. If private corps will own entire public health-care system this will be an issue. Charging for services will not limited at all. There is almost no competition in this area since have huge entry difficulties. And even someone would be able to get into competition with this shark corp. they simply buy him.
So while the company could (and should) have done more. The real issue is that there should be statewide clear policy and regulation that defines what standards (public / private) entities must meet if they provide these services. And I do image these would be stringent and complex.
In non-urban areas, at least if there's no serious risk of wildfires, firefighting is clearly not a public good. If your farmhouse start to burn, it's not going to threaten anyone but you, and paying firefighters to save it doesn't benefit anyone but you.
And in a (rare?) case of economic theory working in practice too, that's what we often observe: Rural fire departments often require fees to be paid, and won't fight fires if you haven't paid up.
(That being said: Just because rural firefighting isn't a public good doesn't mean it shouldn't be communally funded out of general taxation. Lots of what governments spend their money on aren't actual public goods.)
It's complicated. Unincorporated areas will often (depending on the state) leave firefighting to nearby municipalities, which will generally charge a periodic fee for coverage and bill property owners who do not pay the fee if/when they respond. Even some municipal corporations (e.g. towns, etc) do the same thing, though generally only in quite rural areas.
My impression is that it's generally pragmatic rather than ideological: most of us live in densely populated areas, but (in the US), most space is very sparsely populated.
Crassus won a reputation for himself as a soldier in Sulla's campaigns in Italy (83), but fell out of favour because of his excessive greed in purchasing estates at knock-down prices during Sulla's proscriptions of his political opponents. Another source of his wealth was buying up property at risk from fire very cheaply and only then putting his private fire brigade into action. Other sources of his wealth were mines, and his business buying slaves, training them, and then re-selling them. In these ways he came to own most of Rome and increased his fortune from 300 talents to 7100 talents.
(A talent of silver is approximately 32kg, worth about 9 years of labour, so 7,100 talents would represent some 63,000 years of labour income. Very rough modern equivalent, about $2 billion, based on labour.)
1) force the population to collectively pay for these services or 2) force specific individuals to provide these services for free
Option 1 is morally questionable and option 2 is a type of slavery, so it seems privatization isnt quite as bad as the alternatives. At least with a privatized service those who wish to opt out, can.
We are a social species. It makes sense that a social species pools resources together for the good of their collective whole.
This whole article just discusses the consequences of not wanting to pay taxes on anything. It perfectly described a libertarian paradise of private, for-hire, emergency services.
The difference is, if the firemen are government employees, they can vote themselves rich.
http://www.publicsectorinc.org/2014/06/firefighter-pay-shows...
Government employees can use violence to steal from you.
And if you think a private corporation can't deploy violence, you probably have never in your life read anything about why we had a rise of labor unions in this country; companies used to be able to call on not only the government's army but also their own private armies to put down, via deadly force, anyone perceived as a threat to the company's profits.
Who are they robbing? Shareholders! But shareholders choose to be shareholders. You don't like what the executives are up to, you can sell your shares.
> private armies to put down, via deadly force, anyone perceived as a threat to the company's profits.
Ok, now you are being inconsistent. You think it's wrong for executives to be paid above-market wages, but you think it acceptable for employees to be paid above-market wages. Every dollar paid to an employee above market wage comes from shareholders!
But none from taxpayers. All out of corporate profits.
Nope, perfectly consistent. If one group gets to vote themselves a raise, all groups should get to.
Or, more rigorously: if we're going to introduce artificial legally-blessed structures to allow people to pool their resources in order to accomplish things, or wield power in the market, that they couldn't when acting alone, then... I think we should be consistent about it. The corporation exists as an artificial legally-blessed structure for pooling of capital, and the union exists as an artificial legally-blessed structure for pooling of labor. I don't see a way to argue, from a consistent moral/ethical position, for allowing one to exist while forbidding the other. And similarly, the fewer regulations we place on one of these types of entities, the fewer we should place on the other.
Therefore, I don't think it's a good solution when the specifications are that the institution cannot fail (e.g., you can't have the police department go out of business or otherwise fail to provide services), and when its good should be distributed regardless of ability to pay (e.g., voting, fire protection, etc.).
While I'm on the subject, centrally planning and allocating the services doesn't really solve the problem of whether it's worth the cost to have one ambulance to serve a town of five people who live in the middle of nowhere. Someone still has to make the decision. We can contrast the ways to make the decision.
In one proposal, the consumers of the services pay free market suppliers for emergency services. Various suppliers compete on features and price for servicing Buford, Wyoming (population 1). It turns out the resident of Buford, Wyoming needs to pay six figures per year to pay for his services. Either he's a Walton and it's not a big deal or he's a normal person and has to move somewhere that normal people can afford to live. Or maybe he signs a waiver stating he understands his home is outside the normal emergency services areas.
In another proposal, everyone gets emergency services no matter what. If a town can't afford it, they lobby up (county, state, nation) to a bureaucracy to get the subsidies they need. Eventually the money gets allocated as a line item in a pork barrel rider on the Save Kids with Cancer Act. From then on it's political suicide and a huge waste of political capital to cut the Buford, Wyoming Fire Department from the budget since, relatively speaking, there's not much to gain by being sensible at this level of detail. The guy in Buford, Wyoming gets a permanent six-figure-a-year subsidy for having absolutely no neighbors.
Hold on, you say, in proposal B you can have qualified bureaucrats (sorry, experts) picking which towns get services and which don't. In this case, we get to blame 'heartless republicans/democrats/whatever' instead of 'creative destruction'. People still have to decide some towns aren't worth it. But it's no longer people paying for what they use. It's someone you need to hire lobbyists to talk to.
I don't have the expertise or time to evaluate ambulance services, or water or police or road safety or much else; I have my own job to do. I don't want direct democracy, which is effectively what the comment describes (voting via checkbook). I like the republican model, where I elect representatives who study and decide these things for me. I call it "government".
As to fiction... the town is a real town. The programs are fictional. But there are actual examples of where the 'experts' are completely absent or otherwise less qualified than the average voter: bridges to nowhere; destroyers and jets built for the last war; subway tunnels that take 100 years to build; veterans hospitals that don't provide treatment; crop-specific agricultural subsidies. The list goes on and on. No president or congressman gets fired because they played favorites or funded even a multi-billion-dollar failed product. People vote on bigger issues (war, 'the economy') and identity.
I don't know why calling those perverse incentives 'republican' or 'government' should make me feel better about it.
They are experienced, full-time professionals in running government. I'm an experienced, full-time professional in IT; I know far less than they do about governing. Like any executive, they don't need expertise in every field under their purview - that would be impossible. But they know what goes into the executive-level decision; they have experts to advise them; they have aides, time, and other resources (e.g., funded studies) to study the question; and they are experts in and practitioners of the highest-order issue of every question, the politics.
Not all of them are good at their jobs - which is no different than people in private companies (and in IT). That's the inescapable nature of humanity and human institutions, including voters and also the consumers you have so much faith in, until our AI overlords take over.
It remains to be seen what impact this has on EMS in the US, but many folks in the industry were surprised that the sale went through as easily as it did. They were already #1 and #2 by a wide margin, the new combined company is staggeringly huge, with no real national competitor (granted, it does have local competition in most markets).
The US should look at Germany, once again: we do have private companies managing medical services - usually awarded in 3-5 year contracts, and e.g. in case of Munich, there are multiple companies in addition to the various NGOs (Malteser, Red Cross, Johanniter). All of them have to provide a standardized set of equipment and education for the personnel.
Oh, and there's a law that mandates that on long-term average, every caller has to be served in 10 minutes from call. This is called "Hilfsfrist" and is mandatory for firefighters, ambulances and cops.
911 responders are always in government hands, though.
Even in Germany, the train conductors got a lot of hate, even though Germany has by far the lowest amount of strike days per worker...
This is one more reason why I try to explain to people that you need to be prepared to take of a problem yourself, because cops and ambulances will just show up and either take you to the hospital or draw chalk around your body.
Self defense is an inherent natural right and its one more reason the right to bear arms is so important.
"Many homeowners in Rural/Metro’s jurisdiction did not realize they had to pay for fire protection separately"
That being said, Bang's is far from a "Wall Street" operation. Like the vast majority of ambulance companies, it's a pretty small mom n' pop shop.