911 Service Is a Joke... or Is It? Let's Find Out
A major new report by National Academies of Science concludes that there is not enough empirical data to determine whether gun control enhances public safety, or whether gun ownership deters crime. The report calls for further data-gathering on firearms injuries. We suggest that gathering a type of related data is equally critical: how often 911 calls result in the interruption of a crime.
[Try telling the thousands of people who have
successfully defended themselves, and/or their family, with a handgun that
there is no empirical data on deterrence of a crime - HOW STUPID DO THEY THINK
WE ARE? If guns were not an effective tool for self defence, perhaps the
government should not issue them to their police?]
The issue is central to the gun debate. The anti-gun lobbies, while
sometimes conceding that people can be allowed to have sporting guns,
vehemently opposes gun ownership for personal protection. The lobbies insist
that crime victims should rely on 911 instead. For a disarmed victim, the
police response to 911 can literally be a matter of life or death. If the data
show that 911 won't save your life when you're attacked by a criminal, then it
would be difficult for government to claim the moral authority to disarm
victims.
[Lets be clear... this issue is NOT central to the gun debate...... it
is, however, central to the propaganda used against lawful/rightful gun
ownership. The only issue of debate [if there were any] in the gun issue is
whether we acknowledge each other as having a right to self-defence - which
all rational beings agree is indeed a fundamental right - End of Story.]
We searched for information on the percentage of times a
crime-in-progress is interrupted following a call to 911. And we searched for
information about how often citizens are protected from harm by police
intervention.
There are all kinds of information available regarding 911 calls:
numbers of 911 calls made, number of arrests made as a result of calling 911,
and types of crimes called in. There are lots of data about 911 response
times. For example, Priority One responses in Atlanta and nearby counties take
an average of 9-15 minutes. In Washington, D.C., in 2003, the average police
response time for highest-priority emergency calls was 8 minutes and 25
seconds. ("Ramsey defends 911 response," Wash. Times, May 11, 2004.)
There are precise data on events such as the two-hour shutdown of 911 in
three of New York City's five boroughs on the evening of March 26, 2004
because of phone company problems. There are even data on how many 911 callers
are put on hold; the New York Times reported that in Nassau County in 2003,
eleven percent of 911 callers got a pre-recorded message and soothing music,
rather than a human operator. ("Nassau 911 Callers Are Being Put on Hold,"
N.Y. Times, Sept. 14, 2003.) In contrast, 911 callers in Quebec City were
redirected to an answering machine only about 0.2 percent of the time during a
five-month period in 2003. ("Thank you for calling 911, please leave a
message," The Record (Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, October 22, 2003.)
So why are there no data on crime interruptions?
We looked through the vast wealth of criminological information at the
U.S. Department of Justice website, and we looked through print-based
resources. Not finding any statistics anywhere on violent crime interruption
by the police, we asked the statisticians at the Department of Justice
directly.
One day later, we received the following answer from the DOJ's Bureau of
Justice Statistics: "I'm sorry but the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) does
not collect data on law enforcement intervening or preventing crimes that are
in progress."
The Canadian government does not gather such statistics either, even
though the Canadian government vehemently insists that citizens must not use
firearms to protect themselves or others. (The non-existence of the Canadian
data was confirmed for us by M.P. Garry Breitkreuz, Deputy House Leader for
the Official Opposition in the Canadian Parliament, based on his queries to
the Library of Parliament and to Statistics Canada.)
Although we were unable to find the statistics for interrupted crimes,
we did find a study of how many criminals are caught after perpetration of the
crime. However, the most recent research is more than two decades old.
In 1977, the Kansas City (Missouri) Police Department examined variables
affecting police response time to 911 calls. The study concluded that the
factor which most hampered the effectiveness of the 911 system was not police
response time, but citizen delay in alerting the system.
William Spelman (a Professor at the University of Texas's LBJ School of
Public Affairs) and Dale K. Brown showed that the Kansas City results could be
replicated in other cities. In their 1981 book Calling the Police: Citizen
Reporting of Serious Crime, Spelman and Brown selected four additional other
cities to study, each having significant regional, policing, and population
differences: Jacksonville, Peoria, Rochester, and San Diego. Despite the
differences, the outcome measures were almost identical among all four cities
studied.
Spelman and Brown confirmed the Kansas City results: the most important
reason criminals escape, despite a call being made to 911, is that the call is
made too late. In other words, the police were exonerated. The police were
not, in general, failing to respond quickly to 911 calls; the calls simply
came too late to do any good. (Of course there are horror stories of negligent
and torpid police response, but these disasters represent the exception, not
the rule.)
The Spelman and Brown report had important implications for the
allocation of police resources: putting more money into speeding up police
response times to 911 would be too expensive and would offer insufficient
benefit to justify the expense. As Spelman and Brown found, "arrests that
could be attributed to fast police response were made in only 2.9 percent of
reported serious crimes."
According to Spelman and Brown, if the crime was reported while still in
progress, the arrest rate was 35 percent. If the crime was not reported while
in progress, and the victim took 60 seconds to get to a phone, the arrest rate
dropped to 10 percent.
Now of course making an arrest is not the same as stopping a crime in
progress. If the police are called while a murder is taking place, they may
(about 35 percent of the time) arrive in time to arrest the murderer, but not
necessarily in time to save the victim's life.
Yet even if we made the artificial assumption that every arrest meant
that the crime in progress was thwarted, we see that two-thirds of the time,
the police will not arrive in time to protect you.
Nevertheless, the gun prohibition lobby, the District of Columbia
government, and many government officials, insist that victims should not
protect themselves with firearms. They must instead rely on 911.
That command ignores the fact that any criminal in control of a crime
scene will not permit his victim to call the police, and that the neighbors
may be unaware of the crime in progress.
Moreover, even if the police are alerted immediately, they still have to
spend time traveling to the scene of the crime, although the victim may need
help within seconds.
For example, on June 5, 2002, eighty-nine year-old Lois Joyner Cannady
called the Durham County, North Carolina, 911 to ask for immediate police aid.
She was killed before the police arrived on the scene. Police deputies came
within minutes, but the killer was long gone.
Might the outcome have been different if Mrs. Cannady had reached for a
gun instead of a phone? Two 80-year old women homeowners did just that, in
Elbert County, Georgia. A News Channel 32 report stated that, according to
Sheriff Barry Haston, "having the guns kept those women alive." Haston said,
"In these two cases I'm actually glad they did because it could have been a
different story if they didn't." There are many other reported cases of
persons as old as Mrs. Cannady, or older, using firearms successfully for
protection.
When potential crime victims (i.e., everyone) consider whether to adopt
particular defensive measures (locks, guns, window bars, alarms, etc.), they
must make trade-offs of costs and benefits. For example, window bars might
prevent a criminal from coming in, but they can also block the exit in case of
a fire. For citizens to make well-informed decisions about self-defense,
citizens ought to know how likely it is that the government will rescue them
in an emergency.
We cannot expect perfection from the police; after all, they travel by
automobile or by foot, not by teleportation. We can expect that government or
university researchers (many of whom are heavily subsidized by the federal
government) would gather statistics directly relevant to life-or-death
decisions.
Dave Kopel is Research Director, and Paul Gallant and Joanne Eisen are
Senior Fellows at the Independence Institute.
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http://www.gunowners.org/sk0703.htm
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Boy's 911 call treated as prank; mother dies
DETROIT -- A 5-year-old boy called 911 to report that his mother had collapsed in their apartment, but an operator told him he should not be playing on the phone. She died before help arrived. The family of Sherrill Turner, 46, does not know whether a swifter response could have saved her life. Police said the case was under investigation. Turner's son, Robert, placed two calls to 911 after his mother collapsed on the kitchen floor Feb. 20. In a tape of the call, parts of which were broadcast by Detroit-area television stations, the operator said, ''Now put her on the phone before I send the police out." Detroit police spokesman James Tate said it was at least an hour before authorities arrived.
Gun Control and
The First Million Mom March [<< external link]
There is of course one group of individuals that WE have a right to dictate
their choice of weapons, yet they seem to believe they can have enough
to kill everyone more than 30 times over.
If we are a "democracy", then we the people aught to be able to dictate to
the government we created for our service, what sort of defence policy
we want, as far as military arms are concerned.
Official 'truths' are examined in connection with the bombing of Hiroshima, the build up of arms
by Russia and America, the siting of nuclear bases by the US in Britain and Europe, Ministry of
Defence statements about the Cruise missile base at Greenham Common, and other US bases,
the amount of government money spent on weapons, 'Civil defence' arrangements and a NATO
'limited' nuclear and chemical war exercise in West Germany, which Pilger describes as 'a dry
run for the unthinkable'. Many experts give their views, including Paul Warnke who thinks arms
reduction is feasible -- 'All we need is the political will to go ahead with it'.
.