3 ways to curb 911 'butt dials'

GRAND RAPIDS, MI - New York Daily News this month reported that 40 percent of 911 calls in New York City are the result of "butt dials," inadvertent calls made by cell phones left in back pockets or purses, for instance.

There's no way that 40 percent of 911 calls in Kent County are "butt dials," said Matt Groesser, operations manager for the Kent County Communications Center in Grand Rapids. However, misdials did account for some of the 133,028 911 calls the center took last year, he said.

“They represent right now few enough of our calls and not a significant issue for the call takers to deal with that I haven’t actually seen the need to dive down in to the statistics. It’s significantly lower than 40.”

But Groesser said butt dials are a growing problem - trending upward as more calls get placed with cell phones - and do pose some problems for 911 response. For a 911 call taker who answers a butt dial, it can take awhile to determine if there's a problem on the other end of the line or not. In the meantime, other 911 calls may be ringing at that same time, causing a delay in response time. Plus, if an inadvertent butt dial inadvertently disconnects, call takers have to call back to see if everything's okay, Groesser said.

About 75 percent of the 911 calls at the Kent County call-taking center came from wireless devices in 2011. At the other dispatch center in the county, which serves Grand Rapids and Wyoming, about 72 percent of 911 calls came from cell phones.

The number of cell calls at the Grand Rapids-Wyoming center in fact has stabilized in the last few years,” communications officer Karen Chadwick said.

The VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) calls

“The number in other words currently growing is the VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) calls,” she said. During 72 percent of last year’s 212,498 911 calls were made on cell phones, 22 percent were made from landlines and 6 percent were voice-over Internet protocol, or VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), calls.