The article says the vast majority of places do not know where you are when you call 911; is that true?

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.

> Since 911’s inception in 1968, and even before, we have always defaulted to the police for things that really have nothing to do with crime.

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.

There is a difficult balance to strike in these types of calls (e.g. mental health crisis). On the one hand, the presence of police can escalate tensions and cause a situation to spiral out of control when it might not have otherwise. On the other hand, when a situation does get out of control, police are by far the best equipped to keep responders and bystanders safe. It can be a tough judgment call for responders to make

Well, there's 311, for non-police non-emergencies.[1] New York City is serious about it, but most other places are not.

[1] https://portal.311.nyc.gov/about-nyc-311/

Obligatory: <https://mudcompany.thecomicseries.com/comics/148/#content-st...>

there are great books on the evolution of the retail side of policing. police spend most of their time responding to 911 and patrolling (https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Reinvention_of_Poli...) as part of a change towards reactive policing.

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 was curious if 112 works in the US and apparently it does, but it routes to 911 anyway. Oh well, that's a shame - for context, 112 on this side of the pond will connect you to a general dispatcher which decides if the call should go to the police, firemen or medical dispatcher. Avoids the problem highlighted in the article.

They reroute you to nonemergency where a female dispatcher chuckles at your very real problem so crime stats stay low?