Kids with cell phones lead to 911 mistakes

This letter is in reference to an article titled "High-tech rattles."

My complaint, specifically, is that you applaud parents for allowing their small children access to their cell phones. I work as a 911 dispatcher and I cannot tell you how many 911 misdials we receive from cell phones as a result of the child playing with mom or dad's cell phone. These are not toys and dialing 911 is not an error to be disregarded.

We receive many 911 calls from cell phones - they span from being misdials to children playing to someone inadvertently sitting/leaning on their phone and activating the emergency signal to, yes we get these, actual emergencies. Some of these emergencies require us to take further steps in acquiring the caller's location due to the fact that they are not able to speak, for a bounty of reasons.

Our protocol is to take these arduous, extra-added steps of location gathering when we are not able to make voice contact with the caller and get any specific information from them. There are times when we have done all of this and the phone was being used as a rattle by the child of the household.

I severely condemn the positive message of allowing children access to their parents' cell phones. We, as dispatchers, are greatly inundated on a daily basis with hundreds of phone calls; both land lines and cell phones. A majority of our calls do require police or fire department responses but a large fraction of them are careless accidents that could very easily be avoided if people were more diligent.

L. Penny Wiese

Palatine