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I founded and ran a VoIP 9-1-1 company for a few years. 911 is run and financed at the very local level. There's around 9000 PSAPs (public safety answering points) in the US, most of them have a large amount of leeway in doing their own thing. (Some states have better state-level coordination.)

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.

Could you and your guantamllan neighbors cooperate to share those guards amongst several houses? You could even create an easy to remember phone number ;)

Kidding aside, thank you for the thoughtful post.

What you're describing is a gated community. Those exist in Guatemala.

You can share guards with a neighbor even without being behind the same fence. What he's describing is merely a community.

Sure, but without a wall and entry point it becomes much more difficult to monitor people in and out. Foot and car traffic gets scanned and must be buzzed into the area. Taxis or anything suspicious are forced to open the trunk and get a quick security check on exit (avoid kidnapping/theft).

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.

What's the upside to living in Guatemala? I ask this as a first generation American and as someone who is considering leaving the states for a while.

Not much. I'm here with my girls due to immigration stuff we need to sort out (my wife's from here).

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.

This doesn't sound right. I don't know as much about other cities but if you call 911 in Manhattan you're going to be connected to a call center at Metrotech in Brooklyn, a few blocks from where I am typing this, where a real live human who is almost certainly from NYC and lives here will answer your call, determine the precinct and sector and get the job to dispatch.

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.

> Your story about calling 911 in NYC and getting an out of town call center is obvious fiction

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?

In San Francisco, if you dial 911 on a cell phone you get the CHP, not San Francisco police. Adds delay to the help getting there.

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.

In SF when you dial 911 it is a good solid five minutes before anyone picks up because there is first the TTY modem handshake and then a recorded message in English, Spanish, more than one kind of Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Tagalog, and on and on.

Kind of amazing you can't make an account on 911.com, register your cell phone and home phone #s and put in your preferred language, allergies to medicines, serious illnesses etc and have all that come up to the dispatcher when you call....

But I also worked in that industry for a while and thats not going to happen anytime soon by the looks of it

Not incorrect, although the revamped system has become pretty infamous for going down, leading lines to ring busy and overworked dispatchers to revert to pen and paper. The outages have been responsible for several deaths.

http://lubbockonline.com/stories/020299/LA0689.shtml#.V2_jIp...

The article you're linking to has a dateline of 1999.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

When there was a fire in the coop building I was living in Brooklyn the first fire truck was there in minutes of the 911 call and a whole group of them was in under 10.

I never said I got an "out of town call center." I said the dispatcher was not a local. Obviously I couldn't tell you where the call center was (though another time I called, I was routed straight away to the NY State Police and I have no idea why).

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.

Live exposed wires is not an emergency. That's what 311 is for (or similar City Information and Reporting services.)

I have lived in NYC for 17 years and you are the first person I have heard use the term sidewalk shed.

Here it is used by the New York Times, described as "ubiquitous":

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/25/nyregion/the-sidewalk-shed...

The New York Times has lived in NYC for over 160 years.

Perhaps it is familiar to newspapers and people in public service? As a lifetime NYC resident, I'd like to add a data point: I am familiar with the sight, but I have never heard the term before.

> 911 is broken. Be prepared to take care of yourself.

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.

It doesn't ask people to renounce rights, it's just a person telling what the situation is right now in their experience, which is useful information. It's descriptive, not normative. Just like there's nothing wrong with telling someone it's dangerous to walk the streets of neighborhood X at night and it doesn't "happily" imply that it should be dangerous to walk the streets of neighborhood X at night.

> For the past 30 years all around the world all cities are safer than ever.

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).

This must be heavily dependent on where you live. I've called 911 three times in California. All three times the fire trucks showed up in less than five minutes.

Yep, came across a man standing in a crosswalk in Berkeley who appeared to be dazed and the people with him asked me to call for an ambulance, explaining that the man had been pushed and hit his head on the street. It was probably within two minutes of my calling 911 that an ambulance had arrived and the man was being treated.

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.]

The non-answer is actually an issue common to 911 centers. A large, visible event happens (like a giant fire), and they get flooded with calls, all reporting the same thing.

With automatic location detection of many callers today, I wonder if the 911 services can play an automatic recording for callers identified calling from a hyper-specific location. Then many people calling from the same location about the same incident will hear a recording that tells them "X incident has been reported and is being responded to, press any key or hold if you are calling about another incident".

As a counter anecdote, I lived in a bit of a rough neighborhood in Brooklyn for a while and called 911 several times for things happening on the street in front of my apartment building. Each time the dispatcher asked a couple of straightforward clarifying questions and the police/fire/ems showed up in minutes. I was extremely impressed and felt good about paying taxes for a well-functioning system.

As a corollary to your counter-anecdote, the few times I've had to call 911 were in a very rural community serviced by a volunteer fire department. They've always shown up within 5 minutes or less, though it helps to live just down the road. Heck, even calling the sheriff's dispatcher resulted in no more than 5-10 minutes between first contact and their appearance.

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.

I remember calling 911 exactly once, when I found that an elderly neighbor had fallen on his lawn, and was in distress, though not immediate danger. An ambulance arrived within 10 minutes, probably nearer 5 minutes.

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.

To add one more datapoint: my personal experience with 911 (called maybe 2-3 times for other people) has all been fast. Mostly responses within 5 minutes, and always within 10.

911 may have a local component and it could be your city being slow.

> 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.

It depends on where you are. I've had excellent experience with the few times I've called, in Arapahoe and Jefferson Counties, Colorado.

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%.

I have called 911 or its equivalent more than a dozen times on three continents. No magic helping people appear within five minutes

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).

Complaints about 911 have a long history; I'll point out the 1990 hit rap song "911 is a joke" by Public Enemy. The video seems extremely dated now, though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPNK0VspQ0M

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. - As a former Chicago resident I can say this is par for the course, in large part because that type of theft is extremely common. As a general rule you cannot leave anything of value within site in your car or it will probably be gone by sunrise.

I have a related experience to share.

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.

It depends on location. John Oliver had a segment about it https://youtu.be/A-XlyB_QQYs

> 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.

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.

That part is reasonable. The nonsense part is

> 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.

Also, everyone knows that 3rd ave ends at 6th street so there is no such thing as 4 street and 3rd ave.

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.

And maybe the caller is actually in Brooklyn, on 3rd Ave, standing next to the 4th St Basin, and that's what they mean by "4th St" (because they are from out of town, and saw that on a sign).

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.

YMMV. Just because you had a couple bad experiences w/ 911 doesn't mean everyone does.