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GlossaryDispatch and call records

Non-emergency call

A non-emergency call requests service without an identified need for immediate emergency assistance. Learn why it can still result in a police report or dispatch.

A non-emergency call is a public-safety request that does not present an identified need for immediate emergency assistance at the time it is assessed. It may concern a past incident, a service question, or a problem suitable for routine handling. The label does not mean the concern is unimportant or that no report or response will follow.

How these requests are handled

An agency may provide a dedicated telephone number, an online reporting system, a telephone reporting unit, or another service channel. Not every community routes these requests the same way. Washington, DC, for example, directs residents to 311 for police non-emergencies and identifies specific local criteria. Those criteria should not be exported as a national deadline or threshold. DC Office of Unified Communications

In a dispatch record, non-emergency may identify an assessed priority or the line through which the contact arrived. These are different fields. A person can use the wrong telephone number, and a call taker can discover circumstances that change the assessment.

Some requests produce a written report without a field assignment. Others require an officer or another service to attend when resources are available. The term alone does not establish which path was used.

Example

Hypothetical example: A resident discovers overnight damage to a parked bicycle. No one is injured, and the person responsible is no longer nearby. The resident uses the agency's non-emergency reporting channel. Staff document the property damage and later provide a report number.

The request can generate a police record even though it did not require an immediate field response. A dispatch-only dataset might not contain it. Its absence from that dataset would not show that the resident never reported the damage.

Common confusion

Non-emergency describes the assessed service need. No action required is a possible handling outcome. A request may be non-emergency and still require substantial work.

A non-emergency call is also different from an online submission. The latter identifies the communication channel; an agency's acceptance rules determine which events can be reported that way. A non-emergency label is not a finding that the reported conduct was lawful.

Reading workload and waiting-time figures

Check whether the source includes telephone advice, online reports, queued assignments, and requests referred elsewhere. Waiting time for routine service cannot be interpreted fairly without knowing which requests were eligible and how urgency was reassessed. A numerical priority should be read through the local codebook rather than translated automatically into “non-emergency.”

Sources