COLLINSVILLE, Okla. — Collinsville police are trying to help victims of domestic abuse and stop accidental 911 calls from blocking their lines at the same time.
They’ve launched a new program called “911 Aware” in order to collect old phones and give them to people who are escaping abuse.
Police said this came about because small children keep calling the police by mistake.
Collinsville Police Chief Matthew Burke said sometimes calls from kids tie up the lines.
“Once that number is dialed in there they’d just smashing buttons they’ll hit send over and over again, and we will get 40, 50 calls in a row and it can be hours of dealing with this one 911 call trying to track it down, I mean it will ruin a shift,” said Burke.
Burke said parents are giving kids their old phones to play with thinking they can’t make calls, but he said even disconnected phones can still call 911.
“If while that’s going on we get a real 911 call and it’s going to Owasso and they transfer it to us for us to handle, you know, that delay while it may not be serious, that delay can be life threatening,” he said.
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Burke said they get the calls every week and the latest stats show around 40% of calls are non-emergency.
He said it can lock the lines for hours. They can’t trace a disconnected cell phone which makes it difficult to find out where its coming from.
“All we get is the area that the tower that’s it’s calling from, which can be 20, 30 houses, sometimes we’ve basically got to go door to door until we find the find the baby with the phone,” Burke said.
To try to combat the problem, they’re offering a swap. They said if you bring in your old phone they’ll give you a toy phone to give to your baby instead.
They’re donating the phones they’ve collected to DVIS, Domestic Violence Intervention Services. Police said they hope that will help domestic abuse survivors have access to cell phones.
Nicole Munroe is a domestic violence survivor and advocate. She said the first thing her abuser took away was her phone.
“I know for me, when I was in those situations, the first thing they go for is your cell phone because they want to make sure that you are not calling anybody for help...But to have like a phone stashed somewhere where you could just dial 911 would really really help,” she said.
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She said mobile phones are vital for abuse survivors and might help save lives.
“I never even thought about just having a phone that can just 911, because they can’t track that, they can’t put location on that, it’s not registered to anybody, I think that’s the biggest thing because they can look into, see if you have an account registered with somebody and it’s just dialing 911 that could be a huge life saver for a lot of these women or men that go through this,” Munroe said.
Collinsville police said they’ve already had about five phones turned in.
October is Domestic Violence Awareness month and Collinsville police said they think this is the perfect time to get this program up and running.
Officers are accepting the phones at the Collinsville Police Department and they’ll give you a toy in return. All they ask is that you do a factory reset on your phones first ,so that none of your personal details are left on there.