Citizens’ emergency calls Requesting assistance in calls to the police

Abstract

Whether they are witness to or somehow involved (usually as victims) in incidents of a potentially or manifestly criminal nature, citizens may call the police to seek their assistance. They do so either on the emergency line by dialling 999 (in the UK; 911 in the US, and 118 in much of Europe); or, for incidents which may seem less urgent or serious and which are perhaps more ‘local’ in nature, by calling their local police station. Either way, citizens call the police about ongoing incidents in order to request police assistance. The call-takers (who may be serving police officers or civilians) typically question callersabout the nature of the incident, often in some detail, in order to determine the appropriate police action. Call-takers enter the information they obtain into a Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) system, which provides an on-screen data entry form with fixed fields for the type of incident, location, and other relevant details (Whalen 1995). Using a CAD system, call-takers are responsible for dispatching police to the scene of the incident, and therefore need to decide whether urgent police action/attendance is required, in which case police are dispatched for immediate attendance; whether the incident is less urgent, in which case attendance within some hours will be sufficient; or whether any police action is necessary or appropriate – the call-taker may decide that the incident is not a police matter, that it is insufficiently urgent to require police presence (e.g. a caller might instead go to the local police station to report the matter), or even that it is a hoax call. In these respects, call-takers act as gatekeepers, assessing both the genuineness and urgency of the call; they make these (often difficult) judgements on the basis of the information given by callers, in response to questions that they ask about the incident reported, and in relation to which callers have requested assistance. These questions, and the information that callers provide in their responses, aretherefore forensic insofar as they serve as the basis for assessments about the urgency, seriousness and potential criminality of the incident reported. These assessments, in turn, underlie decisions about appropriate police action, and whether and how urgently to dispatch police to the scene. Call-takers’ questions, and the interaction between them and callers, are also forensic in another sense; calls to the police are recorded, and these recordings may play a part in crime investigations – and they are frequently used asevidence in criminal hearings. Therefore, calls for police assistance play a significant role both in protecting citizens against crimes, and in criminal investigations and prosecutions.Much of the research literature about emergency calls to the police has documented their organisation, and the typical structure that arises from the pattern of stages through which such calls proceed. Researchers, particularly Zimmerman, have shown that emergency calls to the police consist of phases of activity that recurrently unfold in approximately the same order, each phase consisting of a distinctive task or activity (Zimmerman 1984, 1992a; for an overview see Heritage and Clayman 2010). The structure of emergency calls to the police can be summarised as follows: