Selects: 911 Is Not a Joke

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Hey everybody, Chuck here on your Saturday selects. And hey guys, you know what I'm going to do? We're going to take us on a little walk down memory lane from 2020. And my picks for the next G's.

Maybe up to 20 weeks for me. And then Josh picks his maybe 40 weeks. Almost a year, are going to be walking back through the year of COVID. Kind of what was going on thematically.

That year and before and after. And we'll see if there's any fruit to bear, as far as looking back. I hope this is more interesting than your usual select. But we're going to start it off with February 13th, 2020.

Pre-COVID by about a month-ish. With our episode 911 is not a joke. All about 911 and how it works. Great episode. Check it out. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know.

A production of I Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Brian over there. There's guest producer Josh T. Rockin' it out.

And this is Stuff You Should Know. Take to a dish.

Yeah, one of the rare second takes.

Right. We lost a whole 14 seconds of trying number one. Right. It wasn't any good anyway. That's what it was.

Josh turned into like Elvis Custell was like, "No, no, stop. Stop." I don't know. I don't look at that reference. Well, SNL call back.

Yeah, it was. Nice. So as you can tell, Chuck, I'm pretty excited about this episode, which is kind of surprising because it's talking about 911

and it seems like it might be the most boring thing we could talk about. Are you think? I'm true. What?

With all the people dying. Well, yeah. Cat stuck in trees. Sure. What else?

I shouldn't name everything you shouldn't call 9114. Let's see. Neighbors playing his music too loud. That's one? Exactly.

Yeah, there's a bunch of stuff you shouldn't call 9114. We'll talk about, sure. But one thing, like I'm familiar with 911.

“And I remember growing up as a child in the '80s.”

And I was like, I remember hearing about this new system that was coming around when I was going up in Toledo. Yeah. And I was like, that doesn't make any sense. Because 911, it turns out, it's been around

at least since 1968 in the US. It's been around way longer than part of the US. In UK. Yeah. True.

But I like to think of Toledo as kind of a happen in spot. Sure. Toledo didn't get a fully functional 911 system until 1989. Did you look it up?

Yeah. So you guys resorted to the previous method, which was run down the street screaming for neighbors. Just swinging your cat by a tail. Yeah.

That was your siren. Yeah, I seem to remember. I don't know exactly when we got it. But I think I remember it happening. Like, if I remember correctly, when I was a kid,

we had one of those little cards next to the kitchen phone that had police fire and whatever else. So that had to have been pre 911 or else we wouldn't have had that dumb thing. Right. Yeah.

That would just confuse the children. Right. Call these numbers first. Right. And if they don't answer, call 911.

Yeah. Then do the super easy thing that will route it to the correct person child. Yeah.

Yeah. For that.

That's a long game, right?

It is.

“So Chuck, as new as 911 is, even though it seems old, right?”

Especially for younger listeners, I would guess that it seems pretty. They probably think it's been around since, you know. Of course in buggy days? Yeah. Since rotary phone days?

Yeah. Right. So as old as it is or as new as it is, it's gotten pretty robust. Very robust. Yeah.

Every year, these are some stats that our buddy Dave Rues helped us compile. 240 million calls in the US. Mm-hmm. That is 650,000 calls a day. Yeah.

That's like 900,000 calls a minute. No. Are you sure? I just did that back of the envelope. You made me double-take that.

Oh. And another important thing here is that 80% of calls these days are from your wireless phone. That's a big deal. It is, which we'll get to, but that change things. Yeah.

There is, is that the 911 system that we currently use in the United States is hopelessly antiquated. And they're working on improving it, and nothing that we should say about how antiquated is should keep you from calling 911. It still generally works.

But it's having trouble. It's had trouble traditionally keeping pace with the massive sweeping changes in telecommunications. Yeah. Has gone on in the last couple decades. Yeah.

Because telecommunications is always trying to move forward, and they don't think, like, well,

maybe we should flood the pace for 911. Right. Exactly. And plus, I mean, 911 will see those systems are built alongside the other system. So when the other system leads forward, they have to go through and rebuild this system that's

just for 911. Because you can't get rid of an old system. Because people, well, we'll get to that stuff. We'll get to that. Let's not spoil it.

“But we were laughing earlier about things that you should and should not call for.”

Some of these are debatable, I think. Oh, yeah. I think so. Says who? Says me.

Okay. We'll get to the last one, really, is the only one that's debatable. But obviously, if there's a fire or smoke that you think is a fire. Well, there's smoke. There's fire.

Medical emergency. And you can't, you know, obviously getting an ambulance or I get in a getting your car and run someone emergency room if you can. If it's quicker and you can do so safely.

It's quicker and cheaper.

Oh, well, sure. Cost the gas. Maybe a couple tolls who knows compared to like an ambulance, right? No, that's a good point. But I mean, I imagine if your home just loaded and your kid gets hurt.

Right. You should probably call 911. Call it a call 911. Car accidents, of course, if they are major enough in like, have injuries.

Yeah. Call 911. You should be able to tell, like, if somebody's like, oh, that kind of hurt my neck, you don't have to call 911. Right.

You could call, here's the other thing. If we're saying, don't call 911. That doesn't mean like don't alert anybody. Right. But there are, there's a, your police have their own phone number.

Your local police have their own phone number. They didn't look it up and call that the non emergency number. Right. And then obviously the last category is some sort of crime being committed. Violence being committed.

Sure. Call 911. Yep. That's like no one's going to argue with that. I think so.

Okay. There are plenty of instances where you shouldn't call 911. And yet people reliably call 911 for stuff like this.

“And I think this because it's been drilled in everyone's head.”

It's kind of a double edged sword. You can't drill that into everyone's head. Mm-hmm. 911 911. I'll get a do's call 911.

And then not expect to get some cats stuck in the tree calls. You keep going back to that. Well, we actually had did that. What's the kid? Yeah.

Did you call 911 for that? Well, you know the funny story. It's not very funny. They're my dad. But we had a cat stuck in a tree.

Okay. My dad went up and he got stuck in the tree. And he just climbed up too high. Yeah. And he got freaked out.

I think so. I mean, I was a kid. So, you know, they weren't saying your father's very afraid. And his screwed up. Right.

I was just a kid kind of like, well, now dad's up there. And now there's fireman here helping my dad out of a tree. Okay. And dad's get stuck in a tree. Yeah.

And looking back, I think that's totally probably what happened. Sure. He got way up there. Yeah. Yeah.

That's cute. I'll ask him about that one day. Okay. So your dad stuck in a tree. I would say that's a call 911 situation.

Yeah. Can't stuck in a tree. No. Unless you live in Pleasantville. Don't call 911 for that.

Yeah. That's true. If you have a question about the speeding ticket you got the other day. That's not a call that you would place through 911. You can just call.

There's even a number on the back of the ticket. Yeah. Don't. Okay. Hey.

Bring that back.

Okay. What else, Chuck? Oh, of course. Anything dealing with your animals. Unless.

Well, I'm not going to say that. What? I was going to say if there's an animal attacking someone. Yeah. You would call 911 for that.

Come out and shoot this dog.

Basically, it could be rabid.

It's terrible. Call hectic out. Otherwise, if the cat and the tree lost animals, injured animals, noisy neighbors, I love that day puts power outage in here and imprints these call your power company. Right.

It's that last one I think is a little. It kind of opens a can of worms and that is the suspicious person. Right. Because, you know, they say to call for suspicious activity, which theoretically is a suspicious

“person, I think the distinction is in what we see and we'll get into this later racial biases.”

You know, people in neighborhoods calling the cops on someone because they're black and walking down my street. Right. Which happens. Right. That is not a suspicious person.

Even. I mean, if there's nothing going on, I know people try to justify it.

But then local police say, you know, hey, always call us.

You think something might be going on. Right. And that's where it gets dodgy because that comes down to a human being's perception. So it can be very tilted. As Dave puts it, he put it a couple of ways.

I thought we're pretty smart. He said, people aren't suspicious. Behavior is suspicious. Yeah. And they say specifically to call 911 for suspicious activities.

Right. But again, these are people. So it's just such a weird fine line you're walking there. Another little litmus test that I've seen is a stop just for a second. Because it's suspicious behavior.

You see somebody like breaking into a car like assaulting somebody. That's that's beyond suspicious. That's like the act. That's the act. That's a crime being committed.

So you have a second when you see a suspicious person to stop and think like, What I would I would I call 911 if this person were white. Right. If you're a black person doing this, say, what I call 911, this person were black. And if they answer, no, then maybe you shouldn't call maybe they're not acting that suspiciously.

Yeah, it's just interesting on these Facebook neighborhood pages. It's kind of evenly divided between people saying, Don't call 911 for this. This is just a guy going door to door, perhaps. Right.

Other people saying, no, you know what? If it's 9.45 or 10 o'clock at night and someone's knocking on your door. Yeah. In our neighborhood. It seems like suspicious.

“Maybe you should call the cops and let them work it out.”

And for the cops, they say, you know, call us. That doesn't mean we're going to dispatch eight cars to your home. But we might work you through the situation. And it's all going to be fine. Yes.

But this is the only one where I thought was a little bit like, You shouldn't just say, like, don't call 911 when you see a suspicious person. No, you certainly shouldn't say that. At the same time, though, I think one of the big hesitations for calling 911 these days is like, either the increase or the increase in reporting of people innocent people.

Yeah. Who had 911 called on them being killed by the cops. Exactly. And that death would not have happened. Their death wouldn't have happened.

Right. Had a person been suspicious of them and called 911. And the fact, you know, when news of something like that gets out, it will make you second guess that kind of thing like you're for sure. It makes you realize you're bringing like people who are armed and jumpy out to a situation

where it's just somebody walking around or wherever. And when you look at it from that respect, it can make you second guess the whole thing. Yeah. And things can look like potential malfeasance that's not, you know, like a lot of people.

“You see a lot of people saying, well, I think someone's casing my house.”

Because a car pulled it into my driveway and sat there for two minutes. They asked me if I wanted to know more about Sierra Corps or someone stopped and was taking pictures of my house.

Like, you never know somebody might be taking picture of the oak tree that they're trying to learn about.

Or just looking up something on their phone and standing in the direction of your house. Nine times out of ten, they're trying to figure out about the oak tree in your house. Oh, I'm trying to give people the benefit of the doubt, you know. No, I'm with you. Anyway, it's just that's where it gets a little dodgy for sure.

And what will have statistics later on about actual racial bias? Because it's real. Sure. Okay. Moving on.

You want to take a little break after that seems like a good spot? Oh, I think I do. Okay. Well, everybody, we're taking a rare Josh break. And we'll be right back.

Hey, it's us the Jonas brothers and guess what? We have some big news.

The news. We created our own podcast called Hey Jonas. We invented a podcast. Well, we didn't invent it. We just contributed to it.

First people to do podcast.

Pretty. Yeah, pretty wide range of podcast content. But this one's extra special.

“So how do we, how do we actually come up with a name?”

Hey Jonas, guys. I honestly don't remember. I think it was on a call about what we should call it. And oh, we were thinking I'm originally calling it one of the early names of our band before Jonas Brothers. Well, this is how you guys remember going down.

Yes. I have a very different memory of this. We were talking about a thing. A bit for the podcast. People could call in and say, Hey Jonas.

And then I broke down on my little note pad. Hey Jonas, and offered it up as a potential title. Oh, I got it. But thanks for remembering that, guys. Listen to Hey Jonas on the iHeart Radio App.

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I mean, I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, we're back. That Josh break was invigorating. I wasn't doing anything. I was just taking a picture of your oak tree.

We get off my back. Oh, my gosh. What kind of oak is that, sir? There's only one kind of oak. No, I know there's a bunch of different oak.

Everyone in Ireland is like, no, that's not true. While we're mentioning calling 911 though, you can get arrested. It is a crime to prank call 911. Yeah, you don't want to do that. Or to swat.

He's called swatting. I think that deserves its own podcast. Maybe because there was some... Some guy got killed right from a swatting incident.

“Yeah, I think it's happened more than once.”

Yeah, that's serious stuff. If you don't know what swatting is, we'll just give you the 411 on this abusive 911. I love myself sometimes. Great. So swatting is where you are a hacker, right?

And you can disguise the number that you're calling from. To make it look like you're calling from a house that you want the cops to go to. Right.

And you basically say, like, I'm in this house and I'm holding hostages.

And what are you going to do about it, Johnny Law? Yeah. And the law comes out and usually swat. I shouldn't say usually. In some cases, the swat team will actually enter this house

where people who have no idea what's going on are. Right. And maybe that the people who have been swatted, you know, said something mean to the guy who, you know, called the swat team out on them.

But it's basically, it's not like saying, like, there's a... I think there's a hostage situation in this house. It's I'm the guy holding the hostages and here's where I... Yeah.

It's not the mean, like, in swat team's stick. Right. Exactly. So the swat team's like, we're going to go kill that guy.

You would never in a million years bring your swat team out.

Whatever you do, don't come in, guns blazing. Right. Which we're joking about something that's really happened. Sure.

“So, like, I really think we need to talk...”

Yeah. Yes, the shorts thing. I think so. We'll look into it a little further. We'll do one on swatting and one on doxing.

Okay. The few weird new things that people do now. Right. But swatting is definitely a crime. Yes.

Okay. Also, so that you don't make 911 feel like, I think this is great. This is almost like a public service announcement that we're in the minstrel stuff. Yeah, we do this.

So you don't get in trouble with the 911s. They don't think that you're pranking them when you're not. If you ever call 911 accidentally or say your kid does or whatever, you do not want to hang up the phone. Yeah.

I did that a few years ago. I feel like I accidentally called 911 because I think cell phones have a feature that it enacted like an automatic call by accident. Right. And I saw it and I went, oh crap, in a hung up.

Right.

And I got to call back in a second.

That's great. Ideally, you should. Yeah. You may as a great story from when she was a kid. She got scared.

I can't remember something about her grandmother who was perfectly fine. But she called 911 and got scared when 911 answered and hung up. They kept calling back and she kept hanging up. That's very cute. They came up to the house.

Yeah. A little welfare check. Yeah, basically. But you don't want to do that. Don't follow the uni model of 911.

Like, just stay on the phone and be like, I'm really sorry. This is an accidental call. And I'm definitely not the bad guy pretending that this is an accidental call. Make sure you say that too. My name is Timmy.

I'm five. It's all good. My name is Little Boy.

“So I think the history is fairly interesting because England started nine.”

Not 911, but their version, which is nine, nine, nine. Way back in 1937 in London. I didn't know this. I didn't know it either.

But they were the first city in the world that created the three-digit model.

Apparently as the story goes, there was a fire in downtown London and people tried to get through the fire department. And they were put on hold and switched around. And so they said the town cryer came out and said nine, nine, nine, nine is the answer. Yeah, which, so nine, nine, it's easy to remember.

Sure. I guess no one else was using nine, nine, nine at the time. But this is back in the day of rotary phones, right? Oh, yeah. So that's actually, that was a burden to dial nine, nine, nine with a rotary dial one on.

Should have been for sure. Yeah, I just thought that was kind of clumsy of them. A little bit, clumsy of the Brits. But let me see here. I think it was a 12 mile radius around London at first.

After World War II and what wider. Mm-hmm. And because, you know, Britain like to do a little world conquering, you can find nine, nine, nine and cities all over the world. Yeah.

Where London has, or where England has left there. That's a way to put it for sure. Yeah. And the US, of course, said, well, we're not going to let the Brits out do us. You're going to do Brexit.

Hold my beer. Yeah. We're going to wait 20 something years and do it ourselves. Right, exactly. So, I think in 1957, the Fire Chiefs Association.

Sorry, the National Association of Fire Chiefs, I was way off. They said, hey, we should come up with the easy to remember three-digit number for people to report fires. And other people said, hey, that's a great idea. We'll do that to report emergencies.

And the Fire Chiefs Association said, no, just fires. Yeah. Luckily, no one listened to them. Well, they didn't listen to the just fire part. That's right.

And then a couple of years after that, or maybe, yeah, a few years later, the National Academy of Sciences said, this is actually a really good idea we should do this for calling ambulances too. And then finally, a presidential commission on law enforcement and the administration of justice said, no, all emergencies should have a three-digit easy to remember number. That's right.

So, the FCC says, who should we get in touch with here? How about AT&T? Yeah. Because these were the days of phone monopolies? Right?

Or phone monopoly? It was just one, right?

“No, I think when did they break up the phone companies?”

Uh, I think it was before this. Okay. Because they broke them up into the different bells, right? Yeah. Where are all the different bells part of one big phone company?

That's right. Which one? I just said two different things. The Liberty Bell, the Southern Bell. Yeah.

Bell from Pacific Bell, Pacific Bell, the Bell from Beauty and the Beast. Right? All the bells.

Sure, why not? You can ring my bell. That's a good one. That's a good one.

“But I think more and more by Andrea True Connection is far better.”

What's that? Virtually the same thing, but just a better song. Oh, okay. They got in touch with AT&T. And they said, can you help us out with this?

Apparently AT&T is the one that chose 911.

Because it hadn't been used yet, which is kind of the first ongoing block.

Again, the rotary dial. That was 911's a lot better at 999. It's two thirds better. It's two thirds better. And it was easy to remember.

And I think they had set up at this point already four or one one in a lot of areas. So they just kind of extended that idea of the something 911. Right. So the first, this really surprised me the first 911 call. That was ever placed in the United States, New York City.

You would think so. Washington, DC. Chicago. What else you got? Chicago.

You already said that one. No, okay. I don't know. What about Los Angeles? Yeah, why not?

What about Albuquerque? They're doing fine. Okay. No. None of those are correct.

Haleyville, Alabama, was the site of the very first 911 call.

“Yeah, that's a good little trivia question, I think.”

That is pedal to the metal. By the way, I recently watched. I had recorded all those jeopardy shows with the Ken Jennings on there. The champions. Sure.

Run. I was so in the better TV. It's seen in a while. Really good stuff. Oh, yeah.

Well, I mean, if you're a jeopardy fan, that it was as good as it gets. There's smartest competitors. Yeah. And like big time drama. Because they, you know, they had to bring it on those daily doubles.

It wasn't like a regular show. Like they were daily doubling on like 20,000 dollars and stuff. Ooh. Like it was really tense. Wow.

Like good drama. Yeah. So cool. Because I think Ken knew that. Other guy, the whole telltor guy was a, as a gambler.

And he made his name for really just going all in. And Ken knew this. So he had to do the same. Well, sure. In order to beat these jumps.

If you're playing a gambler, you get dragged into gambling, whether you want to gamble or not. Get in there. Yeah. It's good stuff. Anyway, good trivia question.

It's probably been on jeopardy. Hey, there you go. Alabama did. It was kind of a publicity stunt. Well, it sounds like.

So the little, the little phone company there that Alabama telephone he co, basically said.

It's pretty funny. AT&T is about to do this. You're about to launch this 911 system. We wanted to jump on it and adopt it first.

“So we're going to set this up as fast as we can because here's the thing.”

We'll find out more about this in a minute. But there's no national 911 system. Yeah. All everywhere in the United States 911 reaches an emergency dispatcher. Mm-hm.

We're an emergency operator. But each system is local. Regional at best. Right. So Hayley Villalabam could jump on this and set up their own system and get started.

And that's exactly what they did. That's right. February of 1968. They had a state senator named Rankin Fight. He dialed 911 as a, you know, obviously he's just like a photo op or video op.

In other words, there wasn't an emergency. Sure. It's like, man, what a coincidence that the paid senator had the first emergency. And happened to be standing next to the special phone. That's right.

That a special bat phone, a red phone. And I think in Alabama, congressman was on the other end at the police station. Congressman Tom Bevel known as the pork king. Really? Not just the Alabama pork king.

The pork king or congress. And the state senator said, well, what are you, pork king? What are you doing in the police station? I've got an emergency.

And he said, are we really going to do this bit? I wouldn't force whoever's on the other line to do it. So yeah, it was all just a big show to say, hey, we get it first. They did it a week later. They still have a big festival every year too.

Sure. And 911 festival. I wonder if they reenact this famous phone call. Oh, man. If we could play those two parts.

I'm the pork king. How great would that be for get drunk history? Just put us up there. That's cool. And when I say forget drunk history, I mean, we very much want to be on it.

Are we still pursuing that? No, I mean, just by occasionally yelling out of my window every now and then. Okay. So I thought the crickets are deafening. Yeah.

I'm surprised. No one said like, hey, this is a natural fit. These guys are great storytellers about history. They can get drunk with the best of them. We've been saying this for years.

No one's changed. So no Malaska about a week later did the same thing. And we're the second city. And then throughout the 70s and 80s, it kind of started rolling out. But takes a while to get this kind of thing going.

at best regional system. Okay.

“And your local city might not have the money to put in a new telecommunications.”

Yeah. To be used for emergency services.

And at first, you know, cities that were a little more flush with cash,

because they had a larger tax base had the money to roll these out. So as expected, aside from Haleyville and Nome, it was mostly like large metropolitan areas that were starting to roll out the night. The earliest 911 systems. But the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation,

which was the foundation based on Johnson and Johnson's. Company. They took early interest in this and started handing out grants to rural areas to set up their own 911 systems. So ironically, Haleyville, Alabama, had it not jumped on it.

Probably still wouldn't have a 911 system where it's not for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation doling out grants to like, you know, small towns around the country for their own. Yeah, because they're like, you know what? People call 911, they go to that hospital, we use in Johnson and Johnson products. Yeah.

I'm not being overly cynical, I'm sure that, you know, 911 runs probably good for the band aid business. I would guess so. And baby shampoo. Yeah, because if you can't get an ambulance to that person, they're going to croak. But if you get the ambulance to them, right?

You don't need band aids when you're dead. Nope. That's just like a fact of death. Mm-hmm. But if you survive, you can't need a lot of band aids depending on what you've done to yourself.

That's right. Here's some stats for you. By 1976, when I was five years old, only 17% of the US had 911. You want to know a surprising fact? 1976, I was just poor.

Well, you probably weren't covered by 911. Again, not until 1989. Well, by 1987, only 50% of the country, which is, that's kind of, that's pretty late. I would have thought we would have had a lot more of the country covered by that. For sure.

You would think so. And it wasn't until '99, actually. Chuck that, that 911 officially became the emergency number for everywhere in America. 1999. Bill Clinton said, "Let's do this."

He said, "What about 999?" And they went bill. Yeah, please. Wrong country. Canada speaking of wrong countries. They are very much the right country, because they got

on board with 911 as well. The tab's only true, Chuck, because they were like, "Why make things too difficult?" You know, that's a great question, Canada.

“And I think the answer to that is, you shouldn't make things too difficult.”

Just kind of go with the flow. So we can do the marriage. Do some more stuff here. I was thinking maybe another break. Okay.

Are you okay with that? Yes. Are you sure? Yes. What about you listeners?

Yeah. You're okay. Good. We'll be right back. ♪ Stuff is true ♪

Hey, it's us, the Jonas brothers, and guess what? We have some big news. What's the news? We've created our own podcast. Oh.

Hey, Jonas. We invented a podcast. Well, we didn't invent it. We just contributed to it.

First people to do podcast.

Pretty, yeah, pretty wide range of podcast. Starting in trend. But this one's extra special.

“How do we actually come up with a name, Hey Jonas, guys?”

I honestly don't remember. I think it was on a call about what we should call it. And, oh, we were thinking, I'm originally calling it one of the early names of our band before Jonas Brothers. Mm-hmm. Well, this is how you guys remember it going down.

Yes. I have a very different memory of this. We were talking about a thing. A bit for the podcast. People could call in and say, Hey Jonas,

and then I broke down on my little note pad. Hey Jonas, and offered it up as a potential title. Oh, fuck that. But thanks for remembering that, guys. Listen to Hey Jonas on the I Heart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

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Okay, Chuck. Let's talk about how it actually works. Yeah, in the early days, obviously it was all landline telephones. So when your call got routed to the switchboard, which was a 911 switchboard dedicated to that, they would patch you across phone lines that were dedicated to 911.

To what's called a P-SAP, a public safety answering point. And at the time, they were a lot of times in the fire department or in the police station. Right, so they could just turn their chair and be like, "Sarge dispatch some people to this address." We got a suspicious person staring at oak trees. Right.

And like a rigid like today at 911 dispatcher is a highly trained, highly skilled person. There's a lot of stuff going on. It's like a flight attendant. Remember when we've learned flight attendants are actually trained to save your life in an emergency and they just hand out peanuts as like a side thing?

Right.

This is basically the same thing with the 911 operator call taker.

They know how to do a lot of stuff. But the earliest ones just knew how to answer the phone. Take down your info and then turn around and send it off to the fire department or the police department or the paramedics or something like that. They'd be like, "Okay, I got to go.

I'll see you by." Right. And then they would get off the phone. And that evolved to the call center. That evolved to what was called enhanced 911,

which was in the 1970s again driven by telecom advancing with AT&T. With new technologies, they developed ANI and ALI automatic number identification and location identification. ANI's just color ID. That's what everybody calls color ID. Yeah.

“Remember those cute little boxes that you could plug your phone in to?”

I don't know your little table. Show you in some little terrible readout. Yeah.

Basically dot matrix readout.

Yep. It was calling. Yeah. Pretty neat. And then it was on your handheld cordless phone.

Right. You could look at it. And that was like, "Whoa, we're living in the future." Rich. Or the answering machine now is digital.

We don't need those tiny tapes. Yeah, it's true. That was like a big revolution too. That was huge. Amazing.

Because you could leave as long a message as you wanted now. Yeah. But you couldn't get that clever. Nobody's home. Nobody's home.

Sure.

“You're still recording your outgoing message.”

Right. You could sing it. But they actually had that tape you could buy. Yeah. Yeah.

There was one that was like a whole mix tape of them. I was just like gag answers. The boy. You don't remember that? Not really.

There was a very famous ad that ringing. Really? Yeah. It was like delight your friends. Basically.

Wow. Yeah. It's pretty funny. So this enhanced 911 system. The automatic number and the automatic locator.

That was a big deal. Because now all of a sudden. If you were a call taker for 911 and a call came up on your little computer screen, it said what the number was and what the address was. And because everybody was calling from landlines, you knew exactly where that person was who needed help.

That's right. It saved a bunch of time. It was a very huge life-saving measure. Yeah. I mean, when you think about people in an emergency.

Could be everything from crippling fear, keeping you from even knowing where you are. Yeah. To have been hit on the head and not being able to say where you are. Yeah, you just can't speak.

And so that really imagined that they spend a lot of time sometimes just trying to get through that first step of where are you.

Right.

“So this was an enormously important in the 70s and 80s.”

It really kind of cemented how helpful in life-saving this 911 system could be. And then, cell phones came along. And the rest of us kind of leapfrogged right over 911. Because the cell phone carriers didn't have an I and ALI. When you call 911, still to this day, from a cell phone, it does not come up.

What your number is or where you are in any specific way. And so Congress, or at least the FCC said, "Hey, we need you guys to do something." Like, there's got to be something. It just can't be like, you know, you have no idea where this person is in the country. Yeah.

Because part of the other thing about the automatic locator that they had originally with 911 in the 70s and 80s is it would route you to the closest public safety answering point. Right. So that would be saving time, too. Because the person you're talking to is in the same areas you, and knows the area you're talking about,

and can more quickly dispatch people. Right.

Cell phones, it's not the case.

Yeah. The point, even if they could have located like where your cell phone plan was or your phone was activated, you know, have to live in a city where that is. Right. You have friends that have LA numbers that we're going to film industry here.

“Just because that stupid LA 310323 makes them look like a more legitimate hire.”

Just so cool. So cool and so dumb. Right. But yeah, there would be like, you're in Atlanta. It says you're in Los Angeles.

Is this a prank? Are you swadding me? Yeah. Yeah. So the FCC said, okay, you guys need to do something.

So what they did was they came up with a triangulation where the closest cell phone tower's address comes up when you call. It's good start. It is a good start, but if you're out in the sticks, the closest cell phone tower might be miles and miles away. It's true.

And even if it's not miles away, let's say it's a football field away. Well, if you're in a dense, densely populated area and you're bleeding out, sure. It doesn't help. It does not help at all. But it gets you a little bit closer and it helps to transfer your caller to route your call to the closest peace app.

Yeah. Okay. And then the other thing that they have them do now, phase two of this enhanced wireless enhanced 911, is it gives your GPS coordinates. Right.

Which is so 90s. It's ridiculous. It's like map a quest. Anyone who's ever waited on a ride chair that thought you were down the street from where you were, knows how accurate that GPS can be.

Well, that's still great. But that's way more accurate than what 911's working with.

“Well, they're just working with longitudinal attitude points, right?”

Yeah. One of the big qualities a quality to have as a 911 operator is to be able to quickly translate longitudinal attitude coordinates GPS coordinates into like Google Maps to get an address really fast. And to smooth sexy voice. Sure.

Like Barry White with fingers of fury. Or like Hallie Barry with Barry White's fingers. She did you see that movie, the call? No. She played a 911 call specialist in a movie.

A thriller. It was good. Was it great? Yeah, it was good. Okay, the Brad Anderson directed it. He's like a really quality director.

Yeah, I know that name. And it seemed like this sort of from what? What? Are you going to call me on on that? I didn't hear you from what?

From where? Oh. I don't get what you mean. From where? Like what other movies is he directed?

Yeah. He directed a scary movie called Session Nine. Oh, yes. Okay. Well, then this guy's one of my favorites of all time.

Yeah, that movie. That's one of the best horror movies ever made. Yeah. I'm a fan of Brad Anderson, because he has a range of genres. Like one of his early movies is this kind of spacey rom-com called "The Accidents" that was great. Happy accident?

Yeah. Really good with Mercedome and Vincent de Nafrio. But it had this, this is a rom-com with a sort of a bit of a sci-fi twist to it. Okay. And he did transibarian.

He's done. He did next stop Wonderland was one of his first little Indies. Uh-huh. But yeah, he does. It's unusual for a director to tackle all these weird or different genres.

It's neat. Disprit genres. Oh, you have me at Session Nine. Yeah. The call is is a good, you know, popcorn movie.

I highly recommend it. Okay. I'll check it out. Halle Berry's a call center person. That's all I'll say.

Hey, she's quality. Quality actress. She is.

But the fact that I had never even heard of this movie

really made me suspicious. It did pretty well. Okay. What's in a massive hit, but it did like 60 million bucks.

But that's really surprising.

Like I'm very aware of movie. Like I'll know what the movie is about. Yeah. I've never seen it. Not seen a preview.

I'll just kind of know. Sure. So I'm surprised. Yeah. Okay.

I recommend it. I'll check it out. Yeah. I mean, it's no black code starter. But that's a good one too.

So where are we now? We are now at texting to 911. Oh, wait. Hold on. I wanted to drive this home real quick.

Drive it home.

“The 1996 FCC rule that says you have to have a cell phone tower.”

Tell 911. It's address. The closest one to your cell phone. And then give the GPS coordinates. Yeah.

For wherever that cell phone they think the cell phone is. That's the 911 system that's in place nationwide today in 2020. That's why they ask you from a cell phone. Yeah. Who are you and where are you?

Just like they did in the early days. Right. And this is a problem because like you said earlier, 80% of 911 calls in the United States are made from cell phones. And 911 does not know where you are unless you tell them.

Yeah. But it's also balanced out by the fact that. So you have that want to help. Well, you have that cell phone right there. And immediately.

So yeah. Yeah. Remember the old days you're like, let me find a pay phone. Let me go knock on someone's door. That's true.

“And ask about their oak tree and hopefully I won't get shot.”

Right. So people are calling right away. So I would think that kind of counterbalance is the clumsiness. Yes. Of location.

I think you're right Chuck. We'll see. Well, you're really swooped in there. I say we'll see. If there's some report coming out.

The thing is that there. People have figured out the people. The powers that be who are concerned with 911 in its system are well aware of this major flaw. Yeah.

And our work have figured out how to update it. It's just now we're in the process of rolling out updates. Well, then privacy advocates are going to be like. But you're going to like locate every single person with the cell phone and know where they are at all times. Right.

And Amazon and Apple are like, dude, we already know that. It's like 911 is the only one who doesn't know where you are at all times. Yes. Which is a problem. It's funny.

I saw a wired article from 1998 that was like ringing its hands. Like, oh, you know, privacy advocates are worried that they may be able to track the movement of cell phone users based on this information that 911 works. No, yeah. They're like, maybe. I don't know.

Right. We'll see the future holds. Yeah. So texting the 911 is the latest technology. About 10 years ago, 11 years ago in Iowa.

In Blackhawk, they were the first jurisdiction to offer this service.

And it's still kind of coming out. I think a couple of years ago, they all 50 states had text capability. But it's not everywhere in each state. Yeah, exactly. In part just text, I love day points out.

You can't send the emojis. Yeah. I can't need help emoji. Yeah. But you can't send text and video.

And that kind of thing would be super helpful, I think. Right. So this is where we are in the next generation. It's literally called next generation, 911 and G911. And it's where 911 finally catches up to every other telecom company and device manufacturer already is.

And it basically uses all the information from the Internet of Things that lets people know exactly where you are. Right. Not just like what your address is, what floor of a building you happen to be sitting on right now. All of that information is now going to be funneled to 911 when you call, because 911 is finally abandoning landlines. Landline telecom.

“That's what they're dealing with currently.”

Yeah. They're going over to VIP. So 911 will be using a secure Internet connection in the near future. And when they get to that point, they will be able to accept video photos. Like this is the guy that's attacking the lady, hurry up, that kind of thing.

And then they'll also be able to, because they're setting up a separate wireless broadband network just for first responders called first nets.

Yeah, that's going to be a big deal. And so 911 will be able to say, hey, here's a photo of the guy that you're looking for. And they can't do that now. Is mind boggling as it is, they cannot do that. Yeah, I mean, just to have a dedicated wireless network cuts down on, I imagine interference and potential hacking.

Listen to disaster. If you're out there in the field, you are using your own wireless device that's on the public broadband right now. And so if the public broadband goes down, because there's so many people trying to use it to find out what's going on and like an earthquake or something.

So this separate broadband network just for first responders won't crash any event of a disaster.

“Yeah, and speaking of first responders, I think it's kind of time.”

We join certain people and saying call center employees are first responders. Are people saying they're not? Well, I don't think they're generally thought of as first responders if you work at a call center. Because they just sit around. Maybe.

But they are literally the first and most important first thing that happens in an emergency.

And like you said earlier, they are trained to and walk people through CPR, but they are, I'm like, how to deliver a baby, how to handle an active shooter, suicide, domestic abuse. If you're a kid in your scared, because grandma fell over, like how to handle children, like they're really skilled. And I think it's a shame that like, I feel like the only time you hear about 911 call center responders is when there's a bad one. And you release those calls and everyone's horrified.

And you know, and it is, it's awful, but those are clearly like the standouts. I guess not standouts, the standouts are all the good employees. There have been some doosies for sure. Yeah. I've read about one where somebody called in a wildfire in Oregon.

Oregon, sorry, Oregon. And the 911 operator said, what you're seeing is probably just the play of light sunlight on the fog. Right. It was like, how would you even know that you're in a call center?

I'm looking right at this thing.

It's a wildfire. And like they didn't dispatch anybody. And like a half hour or 20 minutes later, somebody else called it in. And by this time, it was like raging. There was the one lady drowning in her car, too.

That one was horrific. I didn't hear about that one. She was in her car that was going down.

“And I think, I don't remember exactly what happened, but she was freaking out.”

And I think the 911 person was just sort of dismissive. And it was really in kind of rude even. Wow. But you know, that makes the news. Right.

Not the 650,000 calls a day that go through and lives or saves. Like, no, no, absolutely. It's absolutely true. It's a great point. There are plenty of stories of people like of them just like straight up doing hero stuff.

Yeah. Going above and beyond. You should see Halle Berry in this movie. One of the things that can happen is as much as you're trained to not let it happen. You can become emotionally invested in a call totally.

And I've read that some operators are just fine at leaving it at the door. At least appearing to leave it at the door. But others can suffer burnout, PTSD. And one of the big things that I saw that's a huge psychological problem for 9-1-1 operators is that there can very frequently be no resolution.

Right. They can be on the phone with somebody who is like holding someone hostage and they're trying to talk them down. And all of a sudden the cops come in and the line goes dead.

They, if they're not good friends with the cops who came in, they may never find out what happened.

Like no idea they're talking someone through who's been shot or whatever to try to keep them alive and conscious. They have no idea what happened to that person. They have to take the next call. And that's a huge problem. There's no closure.

And then sometimes there is closure. Like if you're a 9-1-1 operator, you probably have been on the phone with somebody when they took their last breath. Right. When they were murdered, when they died very, very scared. Right.

That kind of stuff takes its toll on people. Well, and that's a, it could be a big problem and there could be pretty frequent turnover among 9-1-1 dispatchers. It's a highly berry movie. Oh yeah. It's all there.

Yeah. Because even if they don't get closure on the work site, they could see it on the news that night. Be like, man, I took that call of this murder or whatever. Pretty bad. Sure.

Not a job for me. I don't think I could hack it either.

“And then practically speaking, there's like you have to be able to type really, really fast with a high level of accuracy while somebody's telling you other information.”

Yeah. Like you might be taking info in and you have to be chatting with, you know, cop on I am, who you're sending out while you're also taking the description from the other person. You're just going back and forth. Yeah. You got to be able to compartmentalize and multitask.

Yeah. Oh, none of those things are my specialty in though. If you're wondering you pay for 911, if you have a phone bill, cell phone bills included, that's a little, little search cards there. So that's outrageous to scream socialism everybody. Yeah.

And as far as those statistics we talked about earlier about the racial bias.

Does it give one? Yeah.

“There was a study done by the ACLU in 2013 residents of a grand crossing.”

This is Chicago study, African American neighborhood on the south side.

Weighted 11 minutes for a cop to come after a priority call. Two and a half minutes for the predominantly white neighborhood of Jefferson Park. And response times in that we're four and a half times slower in the black community. And there's, you know, like I mentioned earlier with the people calling 911 on, you know, just an African American person living their life. There have been cases where people ended up dead because of that after escalation.

And that's just like a pure tragedy. Yeah, for sure. There is like, when you have something this massive and huge and it involves people at like their worst moment of their life, a lot of stuff is going to kind of come out of it. There's a lot to 911, a lot of legends and myths and everything. But one of the things I saw that everyone seems to know about is that if you call 911 and pretend you're ordering a pizza, they will understand that you are in a position where you can't talk and they'll dispatch the police.

Supposedly that's a myth. But it makes total sense.

Doesn't it you've heard that before?

I was just thinking of die hard. Oh, I don't remember that. There was that line where he's calling the 911 dispatcher. Uh-huh. Well, I guess I don't even think it was.

“I think it was an actual cop on the other end.”

And she's like, calm down, sir. And, you know, it's not an emergency whatever. And he says, what do you think I'm doing in order and a pizza? Oh, yeah, that's right. And that might have been a reference to that.

Maybe so.

So what are you saying again?

The urban legend is that if you like, let's say there's there's somebody who's like, got a gun on you. If you can somehow get it to the point where you're like, hey, let's order a pizza right now. You could call 911 and say, hey, I'd like to order a pizza code for my address. And then yeah, and that 911 will get what's going on and send the cops out. Apparently that's not true.

But there is there's another there was an urban legend I saw in the UK with 999. That if you call and you don't say anything, that they will send someone out. And I think that is kind of widely believed over here in the US too. Apparently in the UK, that is true. But it's going to send you through a series of prompts if you don't respond.

And if you press 55, it will you will be confirming that yes, you, there's an emergency and you just can't talk right now. And they will send people out. If you don't press 55, then they won't. It'll just take it as like an accidental call. Well, and that's the big benefit. I don't think we kind of brought up about texting to 911 because you might think like,

because people want to text. Well, linear. But there are plenty of cases where you can't talk. You're maybe in a domestic dispute. Or if you're hearing you're hearing a closet or if you're hearing impaired or if you've been kidnapped and don't want to use your voice out loud.

Or you're scared child, like plenty of great cases to be made for texting. And since text to 911 isn't everywhere, FCC has a law that if you're telecom carrier doesn't have text 911, they have an immediate bounce back that says like you can't do that. You have to call 911. Yeah, which is pretty valuable.

It is. And one last thing, if you find an old phone that has a charge in it, even if it hasn't had service for 20 years, you can dial 911. You will be connected. Yeah, that is pretty cool.

Every single phone that is in operation dials 911 for free. Yeah, I like that. I do too, man. I love 911. I think curve on it gets said there's no no greater display of humanity than seeing a fire truck go down the street with its sirens blazing.

That really? It sounds like something's interesting.

“Well, if you want to know more about curve on and get you can just type that into the search bar at how stuff works and who knows what that will bring up.”

Who knows? And since I said that, it's time for listen to me. This is a response when we ask for examples of racism in today's military. And we heard from a range of people. I have to say from this guy who the other guy.

To the other guy. This guy said, I'll just tell you what this guy said in a minute, but other people have said that yeah, they've seen some pretty bad racist stuff in the military, but they're isolated incidences just like in the real world. Gotcha.

But this is what Matthew Applewhite says. Start off on my white guy. I can't speak on everyone's experience while in the service. But during my four years, I saw more camaraderie between the mix of races than I ever see in my real life.

The most, I think, you're right.

“I thought, oh, they taught us from the start in boot camp Marine Corps that you're all nothing.”

And you will all become Marines. And with that in common, it gives a common ground between any race or nationality. They might often refer to African American Marines as dark green. And playing yes, they may have a different skin tone, but they're still green. And over the years, in and out of training, you learn that everyone adores the suck and the hard times together.

And no one is above another, and the end you learn to trust the man to my left and right with my life no matter what his skin color. And ladies, too. There are female Marines. Sure. I'm glad you said that.

Yeah.

“Now saying all this, some prejudice from other people's upbringing do still remain.”

But most of the time, it is shot down very fast with harsh repercussions and it is kept to a minimum.

I made many friends from all walks of life that I would have never even imagined being so close to without the common ground.

We stood on the hard times that we endured together. And that is from an added listener named Matthew Applewhite. Thanks a lot, Matthew. We appreciate you letting us know. Thanks to everybody who wrote in to let us know.

Virtually the same thing. Yeah, except for the couple of standouts. Yeah.

“Well, if you want to get in touch with us like Matthew did, you can go on to stuff you should know.com.”

And I think our social links are there who knows. But you can always get in touch with us via email at stuff podcast and iheartradio.com

Stuff you should know is a production of iheart radio. For more podcasts, my heart radio visit the iheart radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey guys, it's us the Jonas Brothers. I'm Joe. I'm Kevin. And I'm Nick and guess what we created our own podcast. Oh, hey Jonas. We invented a podcast.

Well, we didn't invent it. We just contributed to our people to do podcasts. We get to ask other people questions because we're sick and tired of being asked questions. Well, sick and tired of just a strong way to put it. But you know, tired and sick, tired and sick. Listen to hey Jonas on the iheart radio app, apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Just listen, we don't care where you hear it.

I'm Michelle McFey. And I've been unraveling the strangest criminal alliance I've ever reported on. A Mormon polygamist and an Armenian businessman. Multi-million dollar house for our is in Lamborghini's private jets a billion dollar fraud. But how long can this alliance last? Tell me what you know is somebody coming after me.

Listen to kingdom of fraud on the iheart radio app, apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everyone. This Teddy Melancham. In Tamara Judge from two teas in a pod. There's been one scandal that's consumed our lives these last couple of months. We're recapping the three parts of our house reunion.

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We're dissecting timelines, receipts, blind items, and previous episodes. Amanda and Wes watch out. We're not getting the easy on you. Listen to two teas in a pod on the iheart radio app, apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iheart podcast.

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