Video: 911 Calls Range From Traumatic To Surprising

WEBSTER COUNTY, Miss. (WCBI) – Every 911 call is important to dispatchers and first responders.

Around thirty calls ring into the Webster County 911 Center every day.

It’s a high number, but only half of those calls are actually considered emergencies.

It’s a known thing to call 9-1-1 when you need help.

However, some people call in requesting for help on things that would surprise most people.

Those non-life threatening calls, tie up many things.

When a call rings into the Webster County 911 Center, dispatchers find out who is calling, what they need, and then, it usually becomes the deputies’ job to handle it.

“Every call is important to the person that calls in. I mean, our job is to serve and protect and a lot of these calls that come in are just serving, not protecting,” says Webster County Sheriff Tim Mitchell.

Calls can go from the most traumatic ones, to the ones you wouldn’t believe would come through.

Those range from parents calling in about their disrespectful children, the neighbor’s dog in the yard, and even needing help changing a light bulb.

“I would never discourage anybody, you know, we’re open 24/7. Please call for anything, but some things, you know, it’s possible to use common sense and a lot of times, you can take care of it yourself and sometimes, it might be as simple as just talking to your neighbor, instead of just letting us talk to your neighbor for you, you know, a lot of things like that,” says Webster County Chief Deputy Jeff Mann.

Deputies not only respond to what they refer to as service calls, but also to false calls.

“A lot of times, people will call in, my boyfriend has beat me up, he’s got a knife. We get out there and nothing is going on. She said she didn’t call. We look at the records and say yes mam, you did call. If you call again, somebody is going to jail if we have to come back out here,” says Mitchell.

The fake and less urgent calls tie up phone lines and deputies, who could be working more serious cases.

“Calls that don’t really mean a lot, or should have been handled in a different way, you’re still tying up telephone lines to 911 centers that would hold up people with real emergencies and it would delay response to them,” says Webster County 911 Director Jimmy McLemore.

McLemore has had a caller call in, wanting him to send police to a football stadium, to remove the quarterback from the game. As crazy as these calls might sound, each call has to be handled the same way.

“You have to be very professional, but you know, we just say yes sir, yes mam, we will do everything we can to help you, and we have a legitimate call that’s recorded, so we actually call the police and say we’ve got this call, however ya’ll want to handle it.”