The Daily Q: What are the leading reasons for 911 calls?

What are the leading reasons for 911 calls?

The Bloomberg administration announced yesterday that 911 dispatchers handling calls for police, fire, and emergency medical services have be integrated into a single force – using the same technology and working on the same building floor – for the first time in history. The upgraded system, which is costing an estimated $2 billion to implement, will be able to handle 50,000 calls an hour, more than 40 times more than the average daily volume.

We want to know: What are the most common reasons New Yorkers call 911? What kinds of requests for help will the newly unified emergency call center be fielding and how do calls for fire, police and medical emergencies rank?

If you have information or insights to share, please comment below, write us, or tweet to @thenyworld.

What we found:

We know how many people called and reported fallen branches last year (9,071).

We also know how many people called to request their birth certificates (51,368).

We even know how many people called to complain about it (about 25 out of every million calls).

But while calls to the city’s 311 service are the subject of gigabytes of publicly available data, and it’s possible to parse this information down to the borough where the call originated and precise reason for the call, no such breakdown is readily available for calls to 911 emergency services. The Mayor’s Office estimates of a total of more than 11 million calls per year but the volume or purpose of calls is not listed in the Mayor’s Management Report, the repository of performance data for city agencies.

The New York Police Department is the primary agency responsible for this information. A representative at the department said it was working on the request, but did not provide information by the end of today. The Fire Department of New York, which handles Emergency Medical Services as well as fire calls, said his agency had access to 911 call volume information but could not produce it on short notice.

We’ll share the numbers with you as soon as they become available.

Data Tools

@thenyworld

Our work has appeared in…

About TNYW

The New York World focuses on producing data-driven investigative projects.