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.