“We have two dispatchers, and they're handling roughly 200 to 300 phone calls from people who want to know when their street's going to be plowed. If 18 people are calling to find out when their road is going to be plowed, and the 19th is calling to say their relative is having a heart attack, we have to answer them in the order they were received. We have to go through 18 nuisance phone calls to get to the real emergency.”
“Each one of those cases involves sending an officer up there, meeting with [the shelter staff], coming back to the police department, writing a report and the dispatcher entering a report in a nationwide database for missing persons.”
