This varies by state, but where I am if no one’s hurt and the cars are driveable, it’s considered a “non-reportable accident”

Generally speaking, we’ll still send cops to take a report if you really want one but it’s not really necessary for anything. Mostly it’s only needed if you’re it a company vehicle or something and your employer wants it for your file or something.

Otherwise, you just exchange info and let your insurance companies sort it out, the police don’t really have anything else to do with it at that point.

I believe some areas and departments have an online form you can fill out to generate a crash report.

If the police are very busy, they may tell you to just exchange info, do the online report, or go to the station later to file one, otherwise you might have to sit out on the side of the road for sometimes several hours waiting for an officer while they deal with higher priority incidents.

If there are injuries, or if the cars aren’t driveable, that does require a police report and will have a higher priority response because of it.

Again, that varies a lot from one state to another, I’m only speaking about the situation where I work.

These days at least some voice assistants can do it, I’ve gotten 911 calls that way. Might depend on the phone and software version.

Also fall or accident detections from someone dropping their phones.

And some phones have a setting where it’ll initiate a 911 call if you press the power button 5 times or something like that.

Always a good idea to take a few minutes to go through your phones settings to see which of these features you have turned on and whether you actually should have those turned on. You wouldn’t believe the amount of butt dials we get.

Also a reminder that deactivated phones without service can still call 911, a lot of people give their old phones to little kids to play with and we get a lot of calls that way. And little kids sometimes say some wild stuff, so you might just get fire engines showing up at your house because a kid said some magic words and we have to err on the side of caution.

And since I’m on that topic now, every agency varies a bit. Until fairly recently where I work, we could ignore most butt dials if we didn’t hear anything suspicious, but they recently changed that policy, so now as long as we have a decent location ping from your phone, we’re dispatching officers to all of them and have to call them back. I don’t think most of our departments put a whole lot of effort into trying to track people down, mostly they drive through the neighborhood looking for anything suspicious, and maybe try calling back themselves, but it’s still kind of a waste of time in most cases.

At my agency though, if you call accidentally but stay on the line and confirm there’s no emergency, we can still ignore it as long as we don’t hear anything suspicious going on. The second you hang up though without making contact, we have to enter the call, and try calling you back.

Protip- if we call you back, you don’t really have to answer or answer any questions if you do. But if you answer we have to try to verify your location, and if you give us that, a cops may still gonna come knocking at your door even if we tell them you said there was no emergency. Some cops and departments will take it at face value and disregard from there but it’s out of our hands at that point.

You’re not gonna get in trouble for an accidental call, it’s not a big deal, I get dozens, maybe hundreds of them every day. But if you want to avoid the aggravation, either stay on the line or ignore any incoming calls.

Again, those policies will vary a bit from one agency to another, I can only speak for where I work.

Neat, be interesting to hear from the horses mouth. (At it were.)

Dunno if I could do your job, good on ya. All the times I’ve had to phone 911 they’ve been calm and collected and it’s certainly helped keep me calm as well. (The above story sadly is just the first time.)

Childhood trauma is horrible, I’m sorry ): you deserved a safe home, and it’s tragic you felt so scared that you had to call the cops.

According to the training at various jobs I’ve held, if gunshots are likely to be a threat, you should lay down wherever is available and put your knees under your chest to kink up your body.

The reasoning given was that bullets tend to travel in a straight line, so if you minimize the straight lines in your body, you’re in less danger. This never really made sense to me, but it’s what I was officially told.

If you were in something like a cast iron tub, that might protect you, but I doubt any modern tub would make much of a difference.

I’m glad you survived your experience!

I work in 911 dispatch, reckless driver calls are one of the more annoying calls for us to handle

And to be clear, I’m not saying don’t call for a reckless driver, I’ve done it myself a couple of times since I’ve been working here. They are an emergency and we do treat it as such, but they’re still a pain.

This isn’t directed at you specifically, this is just a general rant on the topic.

First of all, we never want anyone to follow a reckless driver. If they’re speeding, aggressively weaving through traffic, running red lights, etc. and you’re trying to keep up with them guess what, we’ve got two reckless drivers now.

And of course if they think you’re following them, they’re probably going to drive even more recklessly, or worse they do something stupid like try to run you off the road or pull a gun on you or something. Crazy shit happens like that all the time, I live and work in what I’d consider a pretty safe area, but barely a week goes by where I don’t see a call go in about someone waving a gun in traffic. This week it was a fucking shotgun.

But of course no matter how much we tell people not to follow, some idiots want to play at being an action hero and won’t stop. The worst about this is probably off-duty officers, it’s like dude you don’t have flashing lights on your personal vehicle, you’re not in uniform, and you’re not getting paid for this shit, the fuck are you doing? You look for all the world like some crazy wannabe vigilante, and that’s kind of what you actually are right now.

At least at my agency, if you just happen to be heading the same direction as them, we’ll stay on the line giving our cops location updates, but again, we really don’t want you following them.

The other issue is that often there’s just not a cop conveniently nearby and available. In the area I work, we have some semi-rural areas, with towns that are physically large, but low population so nothing much ever happens there, and there might only be one or two officers on duty at any given time, and that’s all they really need. If they’re tied up on something or just happen to be on the other side of the town, odds are they can’t catch up in time. They might make a real effort to do it, but the odds aren’t in their favor.

Then we have smaller, denser towns with a lot of officers, but a lot of those towns keep their officers busy. Is it worth diverting an officer from a domestic for a reckless driver that they may not be able to catch up to? Probably not in most cases.

And sometimes you’re crossing jurisdictions, so even if we’re giving them constant updates, we can only get the information passed along to the next department down the roads so quickly and we don’t know where they may be turning up ahead to try to get someone in position.

There’s one highway in my county where different stretches of it are covered by different departments. Depending on traffic you could pass through parts of it covered by 2 different state police barracks and 4 different local departments across 3 counties in the space of about 10 minutes, and you can add in a few more departments if they get off the highway at certain points and make certain turns. Trying to get someone in a position to intercept there is a nightmare, and you might have to get transferred between a couple different dispatch centers along the way.

There’s also location. Yes we get a location from your phone, but it’s not always super accurate, and it doesn’t always update quickly, which makes it almost useless when we’re trying to pinpoint a moving vehicle. If they’re flying along at 60mph, they might be a half mile away from where we got our last ping before it updates again, and that ping might only be accurate to within a few hundred meters which could put them somewhere on any number of different roads.

So we’re really relying on our callers to give us a good location, and frankly people just never have any clue where the hell they are, the name of the road, an address a cross street, a nearby business (that’s something identifiable, because dude there are like 5 Sunocos along that main road in that town, you need to be a little more specific) and of course trying to get a direction of travel is like pulling teeth. I don’t need north/south/east/or west even, just something like “they’re heading towards the mall” wound be great.

And even getting a vehicle description from our callers is an adventure sometimes. You wouldn’t believe how many people out there can’t tell if they’re looking at a sedan or a pickup truck when it’s right there in front of them, let alone a color, make/model, or license plate number.

And let’s say we actually manage to get a good description, we get a cop out there and he’s following behind the vehicle. How many of them keep driving like assholes with a cop right behind them? Not many. At that point it’s your word against theirs, and the cop isn’t witnessing them doing anything wrong. Sure, sometimes it happens, but most of the time there’s nothing actionable going on by the time the cops get out there. Maybe they can drum up enough of a reason to pull them over, but if they didn’t see anything serious and the driver doesn’t appear visibly intoxicated, what can they really do from that point?

And of course you also get the really delayed and vague reports like “a red car cut me off somewhere near a Starbucks at about 8 this morning” when it’s like 9 pm and they have no other description. What are we honestly supposed to do with that?

But man, when the stars align and we can actually get a cop out to pull over a reckless driver, at least I personally think that’s one of the most satisfying calls I can take.

A friend of mine had a similar situation, although this was on a highway with someone driving slowly and weaving everywhere. The cops did show up after his call, though, I think while he was on the phone with the dispatcher.

When I was 6, I decided it was time for my 4 year old brother to learn how to call 911. We were in like a filenes basement or something, and while my mom was shopping, wandered to the back of the store, and in the hallway with the bathrooms there was a payphone. So I picked it up, showed him how to dial 911, then handed him the receiver, told him that when someone picked up to say what was wrong, answer their questions, etc. I had no idea you could call 911 without a dime on a payphone, so when he started talking, I thought he was pretending. He said something like ‘hey, im hurt, and i dont know… were in a store.’ At that point some lady came into the hallway and was giving us a dirty look, so I hung up the phone and took him back to where my mom was.

Shortly afterward, we moved stores. Again I took spotted a random payphone, and took the opportunity to educate my sibling. This time he dialed, and told them hed fallen down, and bonked his head and was in a random store, surrounded by clothes. We then hung up and went to go find some toys to play with.

After that, it was time for lunch. When we went to food court, we noticed there were tons of cops everywhere. My mom said something about it, and my brother chipped in, ‘maybe its cus I told them i booked my head!’ And I told him ‘no silly, that was pretend, remember?’ And he said 'oh yeah…" and that was that.