Emergency feature on phones, smartwatches might be accidentally calling 911

GEORGETOWN, Texas - The emergency feature on your cell phone or smartwatch might be accidentally calling 911 more often than you think. The Georgetown police chief presented stats on the highest calls for service for the year, and ways the department plans to make the community safer.

"We look for opportunities all the time to reduce calls for service," says Georgetown Police Chief Cory Tchida.

Georgetown Police Chief Cory Tchida gave an overview of the police department's performance for 2023 at the Georgetown City Council Meeting. Reducing calls for service is at the top of the list.

"In 2023, it was 28,000 and some change, but what was really interesting about that number, and what we presented to council, was that nearly 22.99 percent of those calls for service, the number one call for service we get is what we have titled 9-1-1 hang up calls," says Chief Cory Tchida.

Chief Tchida said this happens when a smartphone or watch accidentally calls 9-1-1 for help, an option on the device designed for emergency situations.

"That’s a good thing, but one of the unintended consequences of your watch, or your phone, is it calls us a lot of times, and you don’t even know it is happening, so we spend a significant amount of our time, of our call load, responding to those calls. Not quite sure what the answer is to that, because you want people to be able to easily call 9-1-1 when they need help, but this is one of the unintended consequences of it," says Chief Cory Tchida.

He says the second-highest call for service is an assist citizen call.

"Someone contacting us because they have a question about a topic. Maybe it is a question about child custody, maybe it is a question about something with their car, can they do this, is legal is it not legal," says Chief Cory Tchida.

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The police department says it plans to take a different approach to mental health calls after they have tripled in the last four years, with nearly 100 calls per month.

"All of our officers and civilian staff have been trained to a certain standard for dealing with mental health calls, and we just had our brand-new crisis intervention team go online last week and their job day in and day out will be dealing with people in a mental health crisis," says Chief Cory Tchida.

According to Chief Tchida, the department has also completed the ABLE project, an acronym for Active Bystandership for Law Enforcement.  

"It’s a training that helps police officers not only deal with their wellness, but also recognize when they are seeing something that they shouldn’t be seeing and then, having the courage to intervene, and that can be something as extreme as an officer witnessing another officer use too much force, having the courage to intervene in that and say ‘hey, that’s not right' down to, for me, even more simple thing like recognizing if somebody is struggling," says Chief Cory Tchida.

Chief Tchida says the Georgetown Police Department is fully staffed with 104 officers.