There was no call-back number given, and no GPS hit on the cell phone. Emergency or crank prank, it was one of those calls the Huber Heights dispatch center could not locate.
Dispatch moved on to the next call, and there were plenty.
Huber Heights receives close to 300 calls a day (about 18-20 percent to 911, the rest to the police department), said dispatch manager Roni Sayer, who said the system also supports Riverside and Butler Twp.
Some are even heart-warming. A little girl called in to ask if the police had found the monster who took her candy. Her daddy had bought it for her, but a monster had taken it while the family was away. The monster was never found, but the candy was eventually recovered.
Candy calls are rare. Other calls aren’t.
Afternoons are usually busiest with vehicle accidents. Mornings are reserved mostly for overnight break-ins and other damage. Nights are for fights, domestic disturbances and tracking suspicious people walking in neighborhoods.
There are serial callers and people who have mental issues.
A man with a mental issue would call to scream and yell, then hang up. Dispatch would track his call, visit, and see if he was OK.
“That made him angrier,” said Sayer, who also said there wasn’t much that could be done about it. There are those who deliberately misuse 911. They have been warned and can be cited.
Sayer estimates there are three to five “pocket” or mistake calls a day and there are always “nonsense” calls, “but they don’t happen too often. If we had been (able to track) the pit bull call, we would have gone out to see what was going on. But it could have been anywhere.”
Sayer said calls like that come in all the time, yet even when police respond, the message often changes.
“We get a lot of calls that say their boyfriend is doing something, or their husband,” Sayer said. “Then, by the time you (police) get out there, they change their story.
“There are times where you can hear people hitting each other, or screaming. Then you get out there, and, ‘everything’s fine. No, he didn’t hit me.’ You get over there, and they don’t want anything. That bugs us. If there are no marks on the people, there’s nothing we can do.”
There are calls similar to the one about the dog.
“You’ll hear, ‘Oh, he’s coming at me with a knife,’ ” Sayer said. “Then you’ll hear a person say, ‘Oh, no, I’m not.’ You don’t know which person is lying.”
There are also the calls from people who just want to argue.
“They’ll call and a dispatcher will say ‘We do care about you,’” Sayer said. “And the caller will say, ‘No, you don’t. No, you don’t.’ And the dispatcher will say, ‘Well, I’m sorry you’re having an issue.’ And the caller will say, ‘No, you’re not.’ ”
In a few cases, if the caller is rude enough, the dispatcher will hang up.
“We try not to,” Sayer said. “But when people are being very rude and belligerent, you don’t have to take that. They (the rude callers) don’t want anything other than to be nasty on the phone.”
Serious calls range from the tragic to titillating. Homicides are the worst, especially when they involve children. “Those calls are tough,” said Sayer, who once had to field a call about a double homicide.
Dispatch workers have 10-hour shifts, usually with four people on duty. There is a primary call taker and a backup call taker. Dispatchers take as much information as they can, not all of it useful.
“There was a guy who called this morning,” Sayer said. “His car was stolen. He wanted us to come and collect the cigarette butt that was in the cul de sac that didn’t belong to any of the neighbors. None of them smoked that brand. Sometimes, you can get information like that, but you still wouldn’t know who stole the car.”
Summer night are busier for fights and December is the time for pre-Christmas thefts, including bank robberies.
Again, not all the calls are for what you’d expect.
There was a call about the hot air balloon that ran out of gas. It bumped the ground once near the Walmart on State Route 201, hopped over Interstate 70 near Meijer and came to rest about where the new music center is being constructed.
Then there was the call the day a pig fell off a truck on the interstate, and another day when the same thing happened to a cow. Officers were called and dispatched for a farm animal round-up.
“It was funny seeing them out there trying to lasso a pig,” Sayer said.
Imagine the dispatcher having to relay details about that.
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