More 9-1-1 Information

By Richard Hannibal

Your father is having trouble breathing, or you witness an injury traffic collision in front of your house; you call 9-1-1! If you are one of many who have given up their traditional 'home' telephone line in favor of a cellular telephone, you will not initially talk to a Morro Bay Police (MBPD) dispatcher.

Morro Bay Police, to date, does not have the capability to directly receive cellular made 9-1-1 telephone calls. Presently, cellular made 9-1-1 telephone calls are sent direct to the California Highway Patrol (CHP) dispatch center in San Luis Obispo, even though you are calling from Morro Bay about a Morro Bay emergency. In fact, with few exceptions, such as the City of Atascadero, CHP dispatch handles all cellular made 9-1-1 calls in the county.

What does this mean to you? It means that CHP dispatch will answer and ask you a brief description of the emergency and then transfer you to a MBPD dispatcher via a direct line between the two agencies. There could be a two to three minute delay in this process. Usually, the CHP dispatcher will give the Morro Bay Police dispatcher a brief description of the call and then 'pass-on' the caller to the MBPD dispatcher. Then, you will have to repeat everything all over again. Sometimes, if the CHP dispatcher is busy, the 'pass-off' to MBPD will be abrupt, without facts, and the MBPD dispatcher must start from the beginning in ascertaining the nature of the problem.

On the other hand, all 9-1-1 calls made on a traditional 'home' telephone go direct to a MBPD dispatcher, saving critical time. Your address is automatically registered at the MBPD dispatch center, which is invaluable if the call is terminated for whatever reason. With a cellular call, the CHP dispatcher merely gets the latitude and longitude of the caller and sometimes only the location of the cellular telephone tower nearest the caller.

In Morro Bay, the best practice, if possible, is to use a traditional 'home' telephone to make your 9-1-1 call. Valuable time is saved, your location noted and you only have to tell your story one time. Of course, if cellular is all you have, use it.

Theft of License Plate "Year" Tabs

Recently there has been an increase in thefts of 'year' tabs off of rear vehicle license plates. Bad guys do this and put the tag on their own plates in hopes of getting out of paying this year's registration. Unless they are stopped for some other violation or an alert officer sees some indication of fraud, they pretty much go undetected. Two or three times in a shift I will see a license plate with an expired tab on it. I will research it on my on-board computer only to find out the car is legally registered. This means that either the owner forgot to put on their new 'year' tab or someone stole it. If it is simply a forgetful owner, they will only suffer the inconvenience of being stopped and warned. It the tab is stolen, it will result in an inconvenient, time consuming trip to the Department of Motor Vehicles office to get a new one.

Here is a handy hint—when you get a new 'year' tab along with your annual Department of Motor Vehicles registration receipt, immediately attach it to your license plate. You can usually do this over last year's tab. Be careful though, the tabs do mount up and if there are many of them on top of one-another they are easy to remove. After you have attached the tab, get a razor blade and mark X's over the tab so that anyone wanting to remove it will quickly realize it will come off in pieces and be unusable.