Reporting Yourself
One night I answered the cellular 911 line and heard
a muffled voice on the other end say "I'm intoxicated
and I'm driving my car." I had quite a bit of training
in handling different types of calls, but never had I
thought about what to say to a person reporting herself
as a drunk driver! I thought quickly and decided to
first try to convince her to stop driving, as she
sounded obviously drunk and was a danger to the public.
"Why don't you just pull over right now, ma'am, and
I'll call you a taxi cab?" I asked her. "No," she
replied, "I don't want a taxi." I tried several tactics
telling her how dangerous it was to keep driving,
describing all the trouble she would have if she got
arrested and sent to jail, telling her that she was
endangering not only herself but the other drivers on
the road, too, but she wouldn't listen to any argument.
Finally I asked her "Ma'am, if you didn't want help, why
did you call me?" She said "um.... I don't know." I
didn't really think she would help to get herself
caught by police, but it was worth a shot, so I asked
her where she was and what kind of vehicle she was
driving. To my surprise, she cooperated fully, knowing
that she was turning herself in, as if she wanted to
be caught! Unfortunately, though, she was rather lost
and could only give me a vague description of where she
was and where she was headed to, but it was enough to
dispatch the call, so I told her to hold on a minute
and I put it out over the radio, adding that I was on
the line with the reporting party who was also the
suspect driver. A county deputy overheard the dispatch
and told us that he had arrested the same lady over a
half dozen times before and he remembered her license
plate number, which helped get us a better description of
the car. About that time, she got tired of talking to
me and hung up. Troopers waited at all the exits she could
have taken for quite some time, but she never showed
up at any of them, so after awhile we had to give up
and assume she had gotten lost. We weren't able to
call her back because she couldn't remember her cell
phone number and our office does not yet have Enhanced 911
ANI (Automatic Number Identifier) displays.
Dealing with this call was certainly interesting, and
certainly made me think about how to deal with really
odd calls that you can't really prepare for.
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