I think the worst case scenario is us getting hit by a hurricane at the same time our local nuclear plant has a major meltdown, there’s widespread cellular network outages, our dispatch center catches fire and we have to evacuate to our backup center, and there’s also a mass shooting incident going on while someone’s trying to deliver a baby over the phone with someone in a moving car speeding down the highway refusing to pull over and also fighting with their husband and causing multiple accidents.

Serious answer- my agency is lucky, even with handling basically every emergency and non emergency call in our county, our staffing and call volume are good enough that even a long wait for us to answer the phone is usually only like 2 or 3 rings. My coworkers are good at what we do, our training is better than what some other centers get, we can keep the calls moving, there’s about 20-30 of us on at any given time depending on the shift and staffing and such, and there have been major incidents where we’ve handled something like 1000 calls in the space of an hour or two and no one had any significant delay in getting their call answered. As a general rule, we don’t even put callers on hold regardless of how minor the incident is, or if they called 911 or 10-digit, we just handle the call and move on.

Non emergency calls, and honestly even a lot of actual emergency calls are a lot more simple than you might think. The majority of my calls have maybe a dozen or so words in the notes, many are just one or two words. I’m not taking a full report, I’m getting a location, a brief description of what’s happening, and some general safety information, giving them some brief instructions if necessary, then the callers name (if they’ll give it to me) and phone number and I’m off to answer the next call. I’m not taking a full report, I’m not an officer I’m not taking a full report that’s the cops’ job, I’m sending responders to go handle the emergency.

Every situation is different, sometimes I’ve had to stay on longer, I’ve had a couple calls I’ve been on for over an hour because the situation kept evolving and we needed constant updates from the caller, but that’s an extreme outlier. Most of the time my calls are well less than 5 minutes, often less than 2 or even less than 1 minute and between all of us we move through the queue quickly.

If we’re not busy, I can take my time, go full customer service, and help people with all of their stupid problems that are in no way a police issue. If we get busy, I can cut right to the chase, get what I need, and hang up.

Some agencies have higher call volumes, major staffing issues, and frankly are sometimes just bad at what they do, and that can cause delays. Some places it is a real issue, but I’ve had to transfer calls all over the country and most of the time it’s a non-issue. Overall, dispatchers know how to keep the queue moving, when they can slow down and take their time, and when they need to power through.

Also it’s a somewhat self-correcting problem. If there’s a long non-emergency queue, there’s probably a long 911 queue as well, and someone who doesn’t really have an emergency is probably going to hang up pretty quickly instead of waiting 2, 3, 5, 10, 20+ minutes for an answer for someone to answer. They’ll hang up and try the non emergency line, or try back later, or drive themselves to the station or hospital, or maybe just decide it’s not a big enough deal to worry about.

There are always weird exceptions and edge cases in our job, there’s very little we can say that will apply to all situations in all dispatch centers across the country. To some extent, you just kind of have to try being aware of what things are like where you are. If you’re not sure what to do, that’s what’s 911 is for, just try to keep things to-the-point, and listen to what we’re asking/telling you.

My thing is that I get so many callers who are really bad at making a determination for themselves what is and isn’t an emergency or who to call. They’ll call a 10 digit police non emergency line because someone’s having a heart attack or their house is on fire or something else really urgent instead of just calling 911 or even instead of calling the fire department or ambulance station, or someone got stabbed and they call the wrong towns non emergency line, maybe even a town with the same name in a completely different state or even country (I once got a call for a town in Australia with a similar name to one of ours) so we kind of have to act like those non emergency lines are also potential emergencies.

Yes, they do go to the back of the queue, and in some places that’s more of an issue than others. In my jurisdiction, if the phone rings 2 or 3 times before it gets answered, emergency or not, that’s a lot for us and we’ve been fortunate that our staffing and call volumes haven’t been bad enough for that to really come into play except for some really bad major incidents (mostly severe storms and such, in which case, most people aren’t bothering with non emergencies anyway)

Some places do have longer queues and it could come into play, but I’ve had to transfer callers all over the country, usually those transfers end up going through on a 10-digit non emergency line because of how the transfer works, so we’re going to the back of the queue, and it’s pretty rare that we have to wait long for an answer. It’s less of an issue overall than you probably think.

Those non emergency calls can also often be handled very quicky. For a basic non emergency call, I’m getting an address, name, phone number, and like 1 or 2 short lines of notes, I’ve entered probably thousands of meet complainant calls (officer just needs to go out and meet with the caller to take a report) where the only thing I put in the notes was “RE: FRAUD,” “RE: HARASSMENT,” “RE: ONGOING ISSUE WITH NEIGHBORS, NOT IN PROGRESS” etc. If the caller is even marginally cooperative and not too long-winded it can take me like 30 seconds, they’re not tying up the queue for long.

One of our neighboring counties does have staffing and call volume issues, and it’s not uncommon to have to wait a minute or two for someone to answer, and sometimes even longer (they got hit hard during the George Floyd riots a few years back, and a couple times I had transfers to them during that that had we wait like 10 minutes in the actual 911 queue)

But a lot of the callers for them tell me that they tried calling the station directly or 311 only to be told to call 911 instead, even for some things that our stations could handle directly (and again, ours can’t handle much)

Location is also a big thing, having a landline address or cell phone location is a big time saver and we don’t get that on non emergency lines. A lot of our callers have no idea where they are, what police department covers their area, etc. (you’d also be amazed at how many people don’t know their own home address) and so a lot of times just trying to verify the location where something happened/is happening is the longest and most difficult part of the call.

It’s also sometimes surprisingly hard to find local contact info. Even with access to a database of other 911 centers, Google, etc. I’ve occasionally struggled to find the contact info for some other jurisdictions when I’m trying to transfer a caller, once or twice I struck out from the usual channels and had to call a neighboring jurisdiction and ask them to be transferred or get the correct number from them.

It pays to be aware of any special situations in your area, if they do have high call volumes, staffing issues, etc. and calling with a non emergency can actually create significant delays

Or we have a couple departments that have chosen to opt out of using our county PSAP for police dispatch (although we still handle fire and EMS for them) so in those areas it is often preferable to call them directly instead of needing us to connect you to them, although that location info is still very useful and again they don’t get it if you call them directly, so there’s been cases where someone calls them directly, but can’t tell them where they are, and they end up telling the caller to call 911 so we can get that location info for them.

But at the end of the day, the point of 911 is that no matter where you are, even if you don’t really know where you are, you know what number to call to get in touch with police/fire/EMS. Hammering on people about what is/isn’t an emergency is kind of antithetical to that, and overall most areas are moving away from that.

If you are absolutely certain that your call isn’t an emergency, you have the time to look up the phone number, and you’re ok with very likely being told to call someone else, or call back at a different time, maybe getting transferred around a few times, etc. then by all means please try the non emergency line. If you’re not sure, if you can’t wait, if you don’t have the phone number, if you need a cop to go do something now, then probably call 911.