Butt Dialing is Causing Serious Strain for Emergency Services

Ever butt dialed 911 on accident? Apparently it happens a lot more often than you'd think.

The City of San Francisco's Department of Emergency Management noticed that 911 calls had gone up 28% from 2011 and 2014 and they needed to figure out why. With calls going up each year, the amount of workers remained the same and the emergency services system was struggling under the amount of calls. Emergency services workers were asked to stay for overtime, and sometimes even had to be forced to.

The San Francisco mayor's office had engineers and developers in a Google volunteer project program research and analyze call volumes and incidents at the call center. In the newly released report, the experts found out the reason for the call increases: butt dialing.

In one part of the report, they found that 30% of the calls coming from cell phones were caused by butt dialing. Another issue with butt dials, is the extra amount of time that a 911 dispatcher must spent deciphering the call to see if it is a genuine emergency or not. Because of this, dispatchers must follow up with the caller to make sure there is no actual emergency happening.

The report also found that the follow up calls take an extra 1:14 seconds to verify that the call was a mistake. A survey of 911 dispatchers at the San Francisco call center showed that 80% of the dispatchers believe that chasing the calls was time-consuming for their day. An additional 39% said that calling back butt-dialers was the biggest nuisance and pain of the day.

The problem isn't just in San Francisco though. In New York City, 50% of incoming calls from mobile phones are butt dials as well. Until a system is figured out to alleviate dispatchers of the butt dials, they will sadly be figuring out which calls are real or not.