911 = ...non emergency?
 

My parents next door neighbour is a 60 year old chinese woman, lives alone(Husband lives in China, daughters in Ontario, Son just moved back to China). She'll go to China for a few months out of a year, and has my parents as the emergency contact for her house when she's out of town.

Yesterday night my parents get a phone call from this woman's friends asking if they've seen her. She was supposed to meet them for Church, but never showed up. My mom looks over the house, doesn't see any lights on but the car's in the garage. She goes and knocks on the door, no answer. At this point she calls 911.

While waiting for 911 and fearing the worst my dad tries to break into her house. Due to fortifications (extra locks, bars on windows) she made due to previous break ins, it's difficult.

An HOUR later police show up. They get into the house, they find her lying semi-consious in a pool of her own urine. She had fallen trying to get something out of her closet, hit her head pretty bad and been there since friday. Ambulances show up later still.

Would this not constitute what would be considered an emergency? You tell me because if not, I don't get it...

cuz people like Valour tie up our police resources ;)

I called the cops once cause some lady wouldn't leave me alone at work, after me already asking her nicely to leave the premises.

I called the Richmond RCMP non emergency line and they showed up an hour later.

I didn't understand why it would take them that long to show up, I understand that I'm not expecting fast response because I called the non emergency line, but an hour? Seriously?

just say she looks like she has a weapon, they'll show up in 10 minutes

Call 911 no matter what. They will determine if it's an emergency or not so you don't have to!
Posted via RS Mobile

^^ than why not just call 911

wut?

I was on the police thread earlier in the week on the topic of when to call the non-emergency vs 911.

It seems as a general rule of thumb is,
if you need to actually speak to the police at the scene, call 911.
if you are just reporting a random incident and dropping off a location/address, call the non-emergency.

emergency services are severely understaffed in the city (vancouver anyway) compared to other major cities. so unfortunately, responses are priority-based. if nothing is actively happening, i would think their responses would be a bit slower as other ongoing crime/emergencies would take priority.

that is unfortunately the state of affairs. personnel can't be running off willy-nilly to every 911 caller calling in an "emergency"..

as for EMS showing up later, when the police radio for the ambulance, they'll mention her injuries and if they're not immediately life threatening, they'll focus on other life/death transports first.


tl;dr: we need more emergency personnel if we want response times to go down.

Damn...poor woman. Had to lie in her own pool of urine because she was unable to move. :(

Good on your parents for doing the right thing.

+1000. That's horrible. Good thing she's (presumably) ok.

wow... that's fucked up... feel sorry for the lady... i hope she will be okay.



My neighbour had the flu awhile ago and when my mom was on the phone with his wife she was telling my mom that his legs were swollen too; we told them they needed to call 911 immediately but they didn't think it was serious enough

so i called 911 and told the operator the situation and the ambulance arrived about 15/20mins later (this was in the middle of the night too).

It turns out that the neighbours kidneys failed (hence the swelling) and his flu was due to him being infected (because the kidneys weren't working) anyhow he's doing fine sort of now (he needs dialysis now) but if we allowed them to dismiss it he most likely wouldn't be here today


good on your parents for taking the initiative

only use the VPD non-emergency number for stolen/lost property (except robberies)

other issues like this should be the normal 911 call

I think it's pretty fucked up that the situation turned out so dire and it took the cops an hour to show up. That said, I honestly don't think it's their fault that they evaluated the situation as lower priority. Because chances were that this was just like 90% of identical 911 calls from concerned neighbors. Chances were, she was really just in the shower or something.

I do think though that it's absolutely TRAGIC that we're understaffed so badly for emergency services and we still have as many officers as we do to do nothing but ticket people for driving 10kph over the speed limit.

If it's money they want, then fine: I'm happy to donate several tickets' worth a year, so that cops can be pulled off traffic enforcement and put into helping out where help's needed. I can't be the only one.

Any word on your neighbor at all?

She's stable and recovering in the hospital.

Good to hear. It always makes me sad seeing a lonely elderly lady.

props to your parents doing a good deed

You're right, my mom probably didn't convey the urgency very well to the 911 operator.

They found her on Sunday, and she's been lying there since Friday? Damn!!

Good thing your parents took action! :thumbsup:

And in my opinion, they did the right thing by calling 911.

ive called 911 before. it took them about 15m to arrive.

What was your situation?

hahaha was just talkn about this kinda thing in class today...hmmm

Well to be fair, your mom called 911 before she saw the old lady on the floor, right? They probably treated it as a possible missing person case and sent a unit over when available. If your mom dialled 911 after she found the old lady then I'm pretty sure they would have treated the situation as an emergency.
Posted via RS Mobile

Something just happened in my neighbourhood 20mins ago.

A silver toyota Tacoma pickup truck was parked sideway at a stop sign for over 30mins.

I walked up and the guy in the pickup claimed he's a police officer and told me to go back to my house, or call 911.

Should I be calling 911 when this happen again? Was it an emergency? (a crime in progress?)

Location: Marpole,Vancouver