Erin's 911 call

You might want to know that some municipalities -- mine, for instance -- do not list the local police station's number. The city wants all public safety calls, whether police, fire, EMT or utilities, to be handled through the 911 number, whether it's an emergency or not. They have call-takers sort out the can't-wait emergencies from the rest. So if my neighbor's dog has gotten off its leash and is wandering around my yard, I call 911. Same if the people across the street are triple-parked and blocking the road. Every call goes to 911.

Don't know if Andrews' area is like that, but you don't know that it isn't.

 

My dad is head of the Street Dept. for one of the numerous metromess suburbs. Around here gated communities are considered private property. The cities do not maintain the roadways or sidewalks within gated communities. Seems to me that perhaps the reason the police told her to call 911 was so that anyone causing her problems could potentially be cited for trespassing.

As to the security at EA's gated community...years ago I worked at a comic shop in a very affluent part of Dallas. Several businesses in the center had been robbed at knife- or gunpoint. Just before the helliday shopping season there was a meeting conducted by the shopping center's owners to discuss their plans for attracting traffic to the center between Thanksgiving and Christmas. The issue of security came up in the wake of the robberies. The center had security but they were unarmed. We wanted to know if there were any plans to have gun-toting security patrolling the center. We were told that the center owners would not pay the increased fee associated with having armed security on premises. When we asked what good calling an unarmed security guard would do we were told that the security guard could call the police on our behalf. My reaction was along the lines of "If I'm able to use the phone to call security I'll just cut out the middleman and call the cops." The unarmed security person that patrolled the center in the evenings was shot and killed a couple of weeks later. The point being: does the community have an armed or unarmed guard working the gate? What is the guard instructed to do in case of an actual emergency - handle it or call police?

Was EA out of line for calling the police? No. She states that she was told by law enforcement to call 911 if paparazzi were hanging around outside her house. Maybe they told her this so they could set up a trespassing case if needed. Regardless, she was following instructions given her to by law enforcement. And as the dispatcher told her "the first available unit" would see her as soon as possible. Nothing was said that led me to believe that they were going to pull officers off a hostage crisis or a bank robbery to go chase the paparazzi away. Besides, I can't imagine that the police see much excitement in Dunwoody. A search for crime stats took me to a bulletin board site where someone asked about crime levels. One person that's a relative of a Dunwoody resident responded "Very low crime rate - in fact, until recently they rarely locked doors."

 

That was my first thought on this -- there is nothing funnier than when someone plays the "don't you know who I am card" and the response is "uh, no....."

But I have to say I agree with the sentiments here (believe it or not)- she should have called 911 if these dickheads were on her property and/or inside a gated community where they did not belong.