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More "the government will protect you" reports
In Michigan, suit is filed over a 911 operator's treating a child's report as a prank, and the article mentions another suit where a woman, seriously injured by a gunshot, had the dispatcher treat her as a nut case. In the first case, a woman had collapsed of an apparent heart attack, and the dispatcher told her son "Now put her on the phone before I send the police out there to knock on the door and you gonna be in trouble."
In Chatanooga, US Today reports thousands of 911 calls a month go unanswered.
Another suit in Canada cites a woman who bled to death during a 31 minute delay in response to a stabbing.
And a girl discovers to her dismay that not all cell phone services support 911 calls.
Comments
Hey, its Detroit! 'nuff said.
Posted by: The Mechanic at April 20, 2006 02:15 PM
It's not cell phone service that has problems with 911, if anything, they're a bit *too* good at it - you do realize that *every* cell phone sold in the US in the last few years has an internal GPS, and happily reports your exact position every 60 seconds or so (unless you turn it off so that it only operates during a call to 911 (look in your menu for "911 locator") (paranoid voice) "yeah, right, it's turned off now... sucker" (/paranoid voice).
The issue is with VOIP, where you use your high-speed computer line (dsl or cable) to digitize your voice and send it over the same network (the internet) that this data is flowing over. The problem is that the concentration points at which they can identify your location are not local, and have no geographic location method.
Posted by: bud at April 24, 2006 01:07 PM