A known issue, which began in late February, created serious issues for 911 callers between February 23rd and March 17th. One such issue, according to this article over at ThisWeek, was that the Apple Valley Police Department took over 30 minutes to respond to a call from a terrified woman who saw someone outside her front door. The Apple Valley Police did eventually respond, and later claimed that they did so as soon as they were alerted by the dispatcher.
While Dakota County was attempting to fix the issue, they did nothing to alert the public and aside from the issue mentioned above, it also caused some 911 callers to be disconnected without reaching a 911 operator. Dakota County did attempt to put procedures in place to help mitigate the issues but I wonder if the recent rise in homicides, stabbings and other violent crimes in the South Metro might have been avoided if this problem was handled differently.
Knowing that criminals might take advantage of slower police response due to the issues being experienced, do you believe that the Dakota County Communication Center acted properly by choosing security through obscurity rather than full public disclosure?
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March 21st, 2008 at 3:47 pm
I don’t know — I would rather them keep quiet than announce to the world that “we’re having 911 problems right now.” Though the incident highlighted is unfortunat, it sounds like the overall issue was handled appropriately in my opinion.
March 24th, 2008 at 2:04 pm
MSPD makes a good point. But now I feel like I need to call 911 every so often just to make sure I can get through when a scary looking thug is standing outside my door.
March 24th, 2008 at 2:34 pm
Well, I’m not going to go quite that far but I do worry about the usefulness of the system when it just rings through ~20 times and you get no response. I’m glad that they had a plan to call back those that didn’t make it through but it would seriously worry me that I wouldn’t be included in that queue when I really needed to be.
There’s no real answer to the question I posed, unfortunately. I wonder how many long discussions occurred, on that specific topic, during that “crisis” period.
March 26th, 2008 at 10:46 am
According to this article over at ThisWeek, if you can’t get through to 911 you can also remember a long string of digits to call instead: 952-322-2323 or 651-322-2323.