It hasn’t become a pattern yet, at least not in my area, but I’m sure it’s not gonna be the last call I handle where bad AI info is gonna be a problem somehow

I did mention it to my supervisor, and did my best to politely and professionally chew the cop out for blindly trusting the AI search results.

We’ve already had plenty of experience sorting out issues where addresses and such that people got from Google maps or whatever don’t match up with reality, but we’re pretty good at catching that kind of stuff and figuring it out.

As far as getting calls passed along to us in weird ways, unfortunately I think the only solution for that is for people to just suck it up and call 911 on their own instead of calling their mom. With a few exceptions for VoIP phones and such, if you call 911, it’s going to your local dispatch center wherever you’re located, and we hopefully have some kind of approximate location for you. The amount of times I’ve had to play 20 questions with a 3rd party caller who has no clue about what’s going on for something I could have cleared up in about 30 seconds if someone had just called themselves is pretty insane.

And even if you do have to be that 3rd party making a call for someone somewhere else, calling 911 is probably going to be your fastest way to get there. It can be weirdly hard to find a good number for local police sometimes, but most 911 centers have access to some database or service to find the right contact info faster than you probably would googling it (I’ve gotten calls come into me for towns in other states or even other countries, because they had the same or similar names to ones in our area, and the caller didn’t double check that they were calling for the right Townsville)

Although, I will say, some 911 centers are pretty terrible. One that borders my county has a bad habit of transferring any calls for something that isn’t in their area to us, either because they didn’t bother to verify the location, or because they just can’t be bothered to look up the information themselves and they know we’ll do it for them. Occasionally they even transfer us calls that they should have kept themselves and I have to transfer a really frustrated caller back to them.

That’s another thing my higher-ups are aware of and working on.