9-1-1 Recordings | Firegeezer

Back on November 20’s Morning Lineup (HERE) I wrote four paragraphs about my disagreement with those few emergency dispatch agencies who seem to be anxious to release 9-1-1 recordings for the public’s entertainment. I wrote, in part: Yesterday, once again, there was a public release of a 9-1-1 tape recording and this one is really pressing the limits, I think. It includes the screaming death throes of a woman who is burning. Several of you agreed with me that indiscriminate release of the phone calls for obviously prurient reasons is more than just distasteful.

It appears that I am not the only one who is disturbed by this practice. The Florida state legislature is considering a bill that would restrict the release of 911 recordings except under a court order showing “good cause.” The bill is in the House where it was originated and is being promoted as a victim’s rights measure designed to protect the privacy of 911 callers. It as generated a vigorous debate between those who believe that the recordings are the same as any public document and should be immediately available to anybody who wants to listen to them, and the opposite faction that believes there should be a mechanism to take out the sensationalism that is sometimes used as a reason for publishing the tapes.

The House committe chairman that is overseeing the bill said, “The real point here is this bill gets to the core of sensationalism. This preserves the right to know while [eliminating] the profiteering off the sensationalism of others.” On the other hand, the spokesman for the Florida ACLU claims, “It places an unnecessary barrier to the constitutionally-protected right to access public records.”

On Wednesday the bill passed out of the committe by an 8-5 vote. Florida’s governor has stated that he is opposed to the legislation.

Florida is not the only state considering this type of legislation. Alabama, Ohio, and Wisconsin are also working on similar bills while Rhode Island, Maine, and Pennsylvania have already placed some restrictions on access to the recordings.

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WFF a

Their vote totals are really getting up there and the WFF tells us that they have an excellent shot at finishing in the top-ten which will move them up into the Finals. So take a moment, please, and give them a click.

Now we will take several moments and get this equipment checked out. I need to take a moment and make some more coffee, too. See you back in the day room.

We’ll start the morning off with a little technical report. Recently we’ve been hearing from a (very) few readers who apparently are getting incomplete downloads when they log onto Firegeezer.com. The reports have been slow coming in because I don’t think that they knew something was wrong in the first place, but it seems that in a few isolated cases the white background behind the writing on our posting hasn’t been loading, leaving the black print over the gray background. Most folks just thought that was how the new page was designed and struggled with it until they finally wrote and complained. And that’s how I learned something was not right.

This is how the page is supposed to look:

FG page

If you are not getting the white background like you see here, then please write to me at: geezerguys (at) yahoo.com, or leave a Comment and tell us a) what browser you are using, and b) what version of that browser it is. Such as IE 6.0 or Firefox 2.0, etc. Also, if you are using Windows, let us know if you are using the 64-bit format. (If you don’t know what that means, then most likely you aren’t using it.) The webpage developers are trying to find out what is causing this so that it can be corrected. Thanks for helping.

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Yesterday, once again, there was a public release of a 9-1-1 tape recording and this one is really pressing the limits, I think. It includes the screaming death throes of a woman who is burning. I find that very upsetting and in very poor form. It seems that in the past year or so, many municipalities have been more than anxious to get the “live” recordings of prominent or newsworthy emergency calls distributed for public consumption. But I’m thinking that they have public entertainment more in mind when they do this.

Recording all telephone traffic in the dispatching centers is a practice that dates back several decades now. But the tapes were always considered confidential recordings and were kept temporarily for administrative purposes only. Prominent incidents, both police and fire, were kept beyond the 30-day life span in case any legal issues such as an arrest and criminal trial might call for the tape as evidence.

Sometimes unusual calls were kept indefinitely for training purposes, too. But they were still confidential information and only used within the appropriate agency. But in the past several years there has been a growing practice of some many dispatch centers to just throw callers’ recordings out into the public domain for what appear to be prurient reasons.

Not only is that of dubious value, not to mention poor taste, but it breaks an important confidentiality with the citizen who has called you for help, not embarrassment. I do not like this practice at all. Not at all.

We’d better get this equipment checked out now. I’ve got to get the coffee started. We’ll meet in the day room later on.

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