The Fatal Flaw of 911
themarshallproject.org
themarshallproject.org
I've toured our 911 call center, since I am a volunteer firefighter, and when you call on a cell phone you are immediately located by GPS and displayed on a map, and even tracked for a short time after you hang up.
And I would not expect Marion county Kansas to be up and coming technology-wise.
Doesn’t seem fixed from a quick Google https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/cellphone-users-in-oak...
They don't in Kansas, either. I reported an accident on the highway last year and they weren't able to locate me based on my cellphone's GPS.
Speaking of well managed states...California is the world's 4th largest economy. The entire Red Belt combined is smaller than California's economy.
If Marion County is getting your pinpoint location, it's getting it from the phone itself, which requires a modern 911 system.
> When using Emergency SOS to call emergency services, the call may include your location, regardless of whether you enable Location Services, to allow the dispatcher to assist you.
https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/emergency-sos/
Android has a similar feature.
There is no legislation requiring this of device (or OS) vendors, but carriers are legally required to make location information available to emergency services, and I think are even prohibited from connecting phones that don’t make this possible. So market forces effectively ensure that all phones do this.
The exception is when the call is too short to get a lock for GPS and location can’t be determined. The phone will still transmit what it can (say, WiFi proximity derived location). Worse case is fall through to carrier triangulation.
Now if you expect your phone to show your position on a map (using the GPS coordinates it calculated from the satellite signal) then it likely needs to retrieve map data from the internet (and in doing so it might be broadcasting over cell or wifi frequencies). But that's a different story.
Much confusion is caused by people saying "I tracked X with GPS" with the implication that GPS allows tracking of remote objects. It doesn't. It allows the remote object to know its own location. For that information to get to someone else (the spy in the chasing vehicle) the remote object needs to be broadcasting that location information through some other means (which has nothing to do with GPS).
Devices need a radio receiver to be able to listen to and decode the signal. Without a radio it's impossible.
The network knows the signal strength between you and the cell towers nearest you. You are usually within range of more than one cell tower. That can locate you fairly accurately. Network data like this is used to augment GPS which can have problems among tall buildings for example.
GPS is entirely passive (it is receive only), so leaving it on is harmless for your privacy on Apple devices. For Android... well, if you have an Android phone, you're not a privacy-conscious consumer by definition, so just leave it on for the convenience of not having to turn it on and off manually all the time!
WiFi, again, is not that big a deal with Apple because they rotate your unique MAC address to preserve your privacy. Android is a mixed bag, depends on the model of phone you purchased.
Maybe you have a Pixel running GrapheneOS. Or you care about freedom more than privacy alone so you want the option to install apps outside of Google Play (and you got your phone before they announced the new restrictions).
Or maybe they are privacy-conscious but can't afford/justify spending $1600 on an iPhone.
Apparently the US 911 system integrated some Israeli tech from a company founded by Israeli intelligence personnel called Reporty Homeland Security that later rebranded as Carbyne. Carbyne was headed by former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak. The company, received much of its initial funding from Jeffery Epstein and Ehud Barak.
I don't know if any of the Israeli tech is running on handsets, but it is definitely running on the back-end in the US 911 emergency call systems. The on-device portion of the 911 emergency calling that grants remote access to location, video, and microphone is part of the closed, proprietary, Google Play Services, on Android.
If running a de-googled rom, you will presumably not be sending any location data or providing other access to your phone when calling 911.
Someone who is usually reliable stated that Scott Bessent had strong ties to this company, Ahud Barrak, and Jeffery Epstien (and was instrumental in getting Carbyne's tech adopted by US 911 system). But, I have not found evidence documenting Bessent's ties to Carbyne. If someone knows more about this-- either confirming or definitively refuting, please share.
The US elite is so intertwined with the Israeli elite and Jeffrey Epstein, that if there is light to be shed, it should be. And, I explicitly stated, "either confirming or definitively refuting". I want to know the truth, not the Israeli propaganda from our Zionist controlled government and media (e.g., Secretary of State, Rubio admitted that we went to war with Iran solely for Israel. CNN sends all stories about the region to Israel military censors to be re-written with pro-Israel spin / denied for publication, New York Times has editorial guidelines that forbid even acknowledging that Palestinians exist unless no way to write story around it-- 'genocide' is a forbidden word in stories about Palestine/Israel, etc. Axios and New York Times publish stories written by Israeli intelligence). And, I do not want conspiracy theories from people with other agendas either. The person who made the statement is an academic who is usually reliable.
I look forward to your sequel to Mein Kampf. Let us know when it’s out.
I suspect Atlanta PD assumes the extremely meager budget (0.06%) for PAD is coming out of their very hefty cut of the city budget (30%+) and has been pushing against anything that smells like an alternative to their punitive model.
Also when calling for someone who may be in crisis, like someone sleeping on the street in too cold a weather, they kinda just bounce you to 911 iirc.
how could it trend differently? you would have to come up with an alternative to 911 generally, which is very very hard.
in terms of preserving 911 but improving outcomes, the strongest consensus among experts is that police need more specializations, much like healthcare.
ultimately i think these problems exist everywhere in the world, and communities where homeless interacting with citizens & police issues are acute, like in san francisco, are actually the future, not the past, for other communities. coercion, like the kind that used to exist in California for the mentally ill specifically, is going away everywhere. it's not coming back.
there are many ideas but ideas that are not going to be enacted are not valuable, even if they are interesting to talk about, and once you get a sober look at what really does get enacted and why, the problem shifts from the specifics of mental health and policing interactions to politics and getting elected.
I definitely think that there’s a ton of ways in which the American police state is a horrible shitshow that attracts power-hungry assholes, but I also think that the nature of the job as it is currently set up inevitably will lead to mistakes from cops who wouldn’t have violent behavior otherwise.
That doesn’t excuse it, of course, but it’s important to understand the circumstances that create horrible outcomes.
What if we focused available resources less on arming police with military equipment and more on better training? For example, the $80B+ that Congress gave ICE (an agency that previously had budgets closer to $10B) could be used to train officers on better community engagement, de-escalation strategies, suspect identification (to avoid relying on things like race, ethnicity, or language), and trigger discipline. It may come at the cost of having fewer MRAPs, body armor, or shock gloves[1] but could result in fewer civilian deaths.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/ice-electric-shock-gloves-85ff746...
As an example, in the state of New South Wales in Australia, its 1 police force organization for the whole state (8 million people)
As with anything, of course it’s going to be partisan, too. NYC leftists don’t want Albany dictating how their police operate, and rural Californians don’t want the uniparty government in Sacramento controlling theirs.
One of criticisms of healthcare is that we need more generalists so that people can afford basic checkups and routine care without obscene expenses. The call for more specialization might only serve some small minority of cases at wildly out-of-proportion rates.
Part of why policing seems so ineffective is because, whether or not it was deliberate, police forces have mutated into the "drug money confiscation force". Most people do not have active problems caused by or aggravated by drug dealers, and certainly not to the degree that would be indicated by how much police effort is expended toward those criminals. When real crimes are reported, we're told "tell it to your insurance company", the police never investigate, solve, or prosecute the people who commit those crimes.
“the problem shifts from the specifics of mental health and policing interactions to politics and getting elected.” +1. Another response to your comment mentions forces being small, which touches on a fundamental dynamic: Baumol-ian labor costs. As long as policing is defined as “an officer showing up” it will grow inexorably more expensive. Many HN commenters are foot soldiers in the effort to oppose automation in the form of cameras, drones, etc.
To fix policing, you have to look at things like a Darwinian system, rather than looking for antagonists or agonizing over statistics.
Quoting vera.org: “ Of the estimated 24,000 calls CAHOOTS responded to in 2019, only 311 required police backup, and in Eugene, CAHOOTS teams resolved almost 20 percent of all calls coming through the city’s public safety communications center.”
To the best of my knowledge, no CAHOOTS staff have died or been seriously injured on the job. I’m not sure the evidence shows that finding the right balance is dangerous. Hard for sure, CAHOOTS put a lot of effort into building the right relationship with the police, but the risk to responders is overstated.
However, CAHOOTS is selectively dispatched by 911 and is only sent to a small percentage of situations which would otherwise overlap with police. (Most of their calls are more general assistance to the houseless folks/public where no police response would occur.) This is largely due to very strict “low-risk” criteria to not send police. This may be appropriate to protect all parties since CAHOOTS is not as equipped or qualified as other first responders — CAHOOTS only receives partial city funding, notably through the police department, and they are not equipped as EMTs/paramedics.
But this also means if you witness someone in crisis and call 911, you cannot be certain that CAHOOTS will show up and not the police, because as the article points out, 911 is set up to send police as the default and will likely do so whenever in doubt. This can clearly have life-or-death consequences for the person in crisis, and we won’t understand the full potential of these intervention teams until they are decoupled from the police and treated as peers with a discrete scope of responsibility.
Are they, though?
Increasingly, in the US, police are being trained to respond to any hint of danger with hair-trigger reflexes and lethal force. They are being taught to see themselves as constantly under siege, and every member of the public who's not a wealthy, able-bodied white person as a potential enemy, actively seeking to kill them.
If I knew there was someone with a mental illness nearby that made them sometimes violent and unpredictable, the person I would want around wouldn't be a police officer. It would be someone who's actually trained to interact with the mentally ill and de-escalate situations.
Sure, it might also be helpful to have someone who's physically strong enough to temporarily (safely) restrain the person having a psychotic episode, or a PTSD flashback, or just a plain old panic attack, to ensure they can't harm themselves or anyone around them while they are being helped.
But if someone has one of those kinds of problems, and I'm nearby, the last thing I want is for a heavily-armed member of the Aryan Brotherhood with a badge to shoot them dead and then boast about it online.
This is great when it works. But sometimes, people having mental health crises just don't want to be de-escalated, you try all the techniques and it doesn't work. (Just like with other medical calls—sometimes you do all the appropriate interventions, but the patient keeps getting sicker anyway.) Physical force should be the last resort, but sometimes there is unfortunately no other choice. (Source: I am an EMT)
It makes no sense to have "first responders" who default to your "last resort".
"OK, so, we think there's a typo in one of the customer records so I've restored from this morning's backup"
"But that loses six hours of work! That's crazy, why did you do that?"
"Restoring from backup is our last resort"
"What else did you try?"
"Oh I never try anything else. I just restore from backup and that resolves it"
It takes time for responders to arrive on scene. Even if police end up not usually not being needed, there can be value in calling for them ahead of time so that they are available in case they do end up being needed. On the other hand, their presence alone can cause issues even if they don't do anything. That's why it's a tough call
Approach without blue lights, potentially park round the corner and wait until requested.
But still, sadly, I can relate multiple instances where we had a patient in MH crisis, who was doing well, until police not only arrived but actively escalated the situation.
Get called to an obviously mentally disturbed person who is agitated and such. Successfully talk to him over a period of time, calm him down, start a plan for getting him some assistance. And then had a cop march back over (who was on scene, saw the initial incident, the de-escalation), and start shouting at the patient over the destruction of property. The patient's property. "Who the fuck do you expect to clean up that broken glass? Selfish asshole. I should make _you_ get on your knees and clean it". Note that at the time, the patient's father was actually standing by with a trash can and a broom, ready to take care of exactly that.
End result? The patient who was compliant and willing to go for evaluation in the back of my ambulance needed to be sedated and narrowly avoided being tased. In the grand scheme of things, worse things have happened. But this was a situation actively under control. And a situation this officer, and only this officer, actively worked to make worse.
That incident resulted in a complaint, though I have no idea what the resolution was.
I'm not sure why that should be surprising. For example, I'd expect the highway patrol to show up first at an accident. Maybe an ambulance or the fire department would be there too.
And I much prefer only having to worry about remembering 911. In Norway I'm supposed to remember to call 112 for the police, 110 if there's a fire, and 113 if I need an ambulance or am having a medical emergency.
That is literally what this article is about though, no?
The issue described with 911 is that the dispatcher will default to the police for something like a mental health crisis which might escalate things to violence. The solution is to change how these calls are handled by the dispatchers and first responders. There already is a centralized number.
I actually disagree with this. The reason why people call police is that they know that the so-called “mental health crisis” is extremely dangerous, in a physical way, not just “emotionally triggering.” Like the dude I saw on the news in NYC last week who was lunging at the police with scissors who eventually ended up shot after the taser failed to get him to stop.
I guess people would like to believe that there’s an army of well-trained social workers out there who could be dispatched to the scene to simply talk someone down from a total psychotic episode, but the fact is that the type of person who’s going to be shot by the police would’ve also stabbed the social workers with scissors too.
The reality of the matter is that people who are severely mentally ill can be very dangerous to others. There’s not an easy way to guarantee they’ll never come to harm unless you’re willing to sacrifice the safety of everyone else by renouncing any possibility of using force.
The focus should be on who is dispatched on the types of calls, not the organizational structure, because in most places it's already what you'd expect and not part of the police
There needs to be a force that can be dispatched to these types of calls, just like they know to send the Fire Department if it requires some kind of engineering/rescue but isn't a fire and isn't a medical call
Also, like 112 forwards to 911 in the US, most cell networks in the EU will forward 911 to 112. American cultural dominance has made it so everyone knows 911 and even Europeans apparently end up dialing it.
It's great that they were able to do this! I wonder what that looks like on their end. Maybe it's just a matter of having a direct telephone number for the closest Dutch dispatch center?
There is a good chance of that.
The fire was in Eygelshoven, Nievelsteenstraat. I don't know how close the nearest fire stations are either side of the border.
This is a ridiculous opinion.
I suppose they think that if America didn’t have so much cachet, that calls to 911 in Europe should route to a recording of someone chewing you out (in whatever the local language is) for being a cultural imperialist.
There is a difficult balance to strike, in that police presence can escalate tension and make a situation worse, but police are also best equipped to protect other responders if a situation does escalate. It can be a tough judgment call
That's not true as a general rule. It depends on the country, even across the EU.
Some have integrated dispatchers, others route it to the police (and there are other numbers for fire and medicals services) in yet others it goes to the fire department only.