"9-1-1 Cell call" knock on the door

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Pablo

Pablo

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Oct 28, 2002
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Everson WA - Pacific NW USA
Last night I was home with my wife watching the NFL game and at around 7:30PM "DING-DONG", DOGS go nuts, hmmm......open carefully and standing on the porch is a local policeman. He says they got a 9-1-1 CELL call from this location. I assured him I did not dial 9-1-1. He was very polite and professional, but I could tell he was not going leave just with that. He said they will check with the neighbors, but it came closest from my house. Then suddenly his husky partner showed up from around entry way to my porch, and about this time my wife came up. I acknowledged the partner with friendly eye contact. Then the lead officer says "No female crying dialed 9-1-1?". My wife assured him, nope and no one else home. So they left.

Thoughts?

How good is cell phone locating?

Is this now some common prank?

Could it have been someone passing in a car?"

Kinda freaky.......
 
Pablo, is there a cell tower near your house? Our agency gets them quite a bit. The provider can triangulate the signal within about 1/2 mile. Could have been a passing car. The 911 center's ANI/ALI (automatic number identifier/automatic location identifier) on a cell px usually comes back to the closest cell tower or switching center.

Hope this helps a little.
Dave
 
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Wow.

They should be able to trace the phone number to the person I would think.
 
SOP for 911 hang ups or no call return hear it all the time on the scanner in my area.
 
It was probably a passing car. The provider probably used the last active ping location. Not super accurate, even the GPS in most phones is only accurate to 100 meters or so, from what I understand. The triangulation method can be up to a 1 mile radius. from actual phone location.

It is quite common.

Dave
 
It may have been an inactive phone. Once phones are off-service, they can still make 911 calls, however when you try to trace them, you get a few block radius.

I remember reading about this a whiel back, kids crank-calling the police hundreds of times knowing this.
 
Recently I was traveling out of state and when I awoke one morning there was a message on my phone from the local police saying that I had dialed 9-1-1 and if there was a real emergency to call them back. My immediate thought was that I must have somehow butt dialed 911, so I took a look at the log of my outgoing calls, and there was only one that was odd--it showed I dialed 0-0-0 somewhow. Not sure how that happened, but would that somehow be transferred to 9-1-1? Doesn't give me a lot of faith in the 9-1-1 system that they didn't actually track me down to find out if it were a real emergency, but I suppose with everyone carrying cell phones with them everywhere there must be a very high percentage of false alarms.

Many years ago, when we had a landline and little children, one of our kids dialed 9-1-1, and the first my wife knew of it was when several police officers came storming into the house.
 
Pre-paid phone will have a number and is registered.

A non activated phone will still dial 911 and work but not send a valid number.

Def creepy Pablo in my book too...
crazy2.gif


Bill
 
We never had a problem where I grew up, but when we moved in 2006 we had the state troopers come to our house 3 or 4 times asking if we called 911 because someone called 911 from our number.

We only had 2 corded telephones ... and it was only the three of us (mom, dad, myself) in the house. Each time we were all right with each other and none of us touched the phone. Each time they had the phone number correct ...




Originally Posted By: Deltona_Dave
It was probably a passing car. The provider probably used the last active ping location. Not super accurate, even the GPS in most phones is only accurate to 100 meters or so, from what I understand. The triangulation method can be up to a 1 mile radius. from actual phone location.

It is quite common.

Dave


I had a blackberry that the closes the GPS ever got was 2500meters.
 
Originally Posted By: Pablo
...How good is cell phone locating?

Is this now some common prank?

Could it have been someone passing in a car?"

Kinda freaky.......


Not very good in all cases. A State Trooper showed up here a few weeks ago looking for Mrs. OilNerd. She was out at the time, shopping at Wal-mart, amongst other places.

After about 20 minutes, I was able to get some details out of the trooper. Apparently someone stole an iPhone there and the it was tracking back to my house. Trusting that my wife isn't a clepto, I called her and we got things sorted out with the trooper. The security footage showed a woman and an infant. Our daughter was in preschool at the time and the Wal-mart visit was off by about an hour and a half.

Creepy.
 
Originally Posted By: Deltona_Dave
Originally Posted By: tpitcher
Wow.
They should be able to trace the phone number to the person I would think.

Not on a pre-paid phone.
Dave


I know they were big in Europe and Asia before they were big here, but with all the terrorism-fighting that our government is involved in, I'm surprised that the pre-paid phone concept was ever allowed in the U.S.
 
Originally Posted By: Miller88
We never had a problem where I grew up, but when we moved in 2006 we had the state troopers come to our house 3 or 4 times asking if we called 911 because someone called 911 from our number.
We only had 2 corded telephones ... and it was only the three of us (mom, dad, myself) in the house. Each time we were all right with each other and none of us touched the phone. Each time they had the phone number correct ...


Not that it happened to you specifically, but another scenario would be if somebody opened up the phone box on the side of your house and just plugged a corded phone into it and then dialed 911 as a joke.
 
This happened to my parents a few weeks ago. Except it happened at 3 A.M. Weird thing was they first received a phone call on their home phone from the police dispatcher saying they received a mobile 911 call linked to their address and officers would be there shortly. Few mintues later two police cars arrived. Asked my dad who lived there then said they would need to see my mom. Hard to get any answers out of the police. Even when my mom called the next day to get some details on why it happened.
 
Pablo, welcome to the new profiling of domestic terrorists. You are on file with law enforcement as owning guns. According to our (un)justice system, gun owners are all violent. When the police got the 911 call, you were the closest violent person to the cell phones location.

They are watching you.
 
Originally Posted By: Loobed


Pablo, welcome to the new profiling of domestic terrorists. You are on file with law enforcement as owning guns. According to our (un)justice system, gun owners are all violent. When the police got the 911 call, you were the closest violent person to the cell phones location.

They are watching you.


For the non-tinfoil-hat response, see the earlier post about cell companies having a less than precision ability to determine the radius from which the call was placed.
 
I honestly don't trust anything about the 911 service here. Most time they don't even show up and if they do, they go to the wrong house or street.
 
Hmm, my galaxy s3 now tells me to input address if I'm connected to wifi and wifi calling is enabled, for 911 call purposes.
great feature, since I travel a lot lately, I can call from wifi like I'm connected to tmobile tower, free off charge, and people can call me too like I'm in US;)
 
This actually happened to me and my friends one time.

A group of about 6 of us were waiting outside of his apartment a few years ago for a local shuttle which brings you down to where all the bars and clubs are downtown. Anyway were standing their, now mind you were all dressed in nice cloths, and this is in a very trendy area of town; so were standing their talking and all of a sudden about half a dozen cop cars pull up. Were all like whats this now? Well it seems someone called 911 from a cell saying a girl was screaming about being rapped or something, and the cops can only triangulate it so close.
 
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