How Not to Call 911: Canada Isn’t Doing it Right
The right and wrong way for non-voice emergency calls.
A Canadian woman desperately tried to get police help when there was an intruder in her home.
Presumably she wanted to use text chat to contact the police rather than call on the phone to keep things quiet, and not draw attention from the intruder. And that’s where it went wrong.
Here’s the story from the This is True newsletter, which I publish:
Help!
“I need help, he is going to come, he is in the house,” a woman typed to the police. The intruder wasn’t her only problem: intending to contact the Durham Regional Police Service in Ontario, Canada, she had instead found the live chat service for Durham Constabulary in England. The constabulary presumably wasn’t in a position to send its own officers in excess of 3,000 miles away to rescue the woman, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t help her: a worker in the agency’s control room reached out to the Canadian service, which dispatched officers to the chatter’s Ajax, Ont., home. A suspect was arrested and charged. (AC/CBC, Washington Post) …If the victim had done her research, she might have learned that it’s not recommended to use text chat to contact police in an emergency, because it’s too complicated.
