Fire – Police Split on Landlines vs. Mobile Phones

You are in your house and all of a sudden an emergency happens. Time is of the essence and you are about to choose between your mobile phone or landline to place a 9-11 call. According to local law enforcement officials, if faced with this choice, an old fashioned landline is your safest bet.

“The bottom line is that a landline is better, “ said Sheri Koomen, Emergency and Technical Services Manager at the . “This is because your landline is connected to data that is absolute.”

Emergency operators are automatically informed of the address of a 9-11 call if carried out from a landline. The caller is also almost 100 percent guaranteed to be coming from within their jurisdiction. Two things that do not happen automatically happen with mobile phones. 

“Emergency calls from a mobile phone will make an educative decision on jurisdiction that will be based on the cellphone tower that it hits,” said Koomen, who further added that the address of the tower is what shows up when placing these calls. “[Wrong jurisdiction calls] happen all the time, they do not take long to quickly resolve, but they could. ”

More and more homes are substituting their landlines with a cell phone. According to a 2010 study by Encuesta, a research firm, 28 percent of adult Hispanics have mad the switch to a mobile phone only home.

This is a find that could help explain why so many emergency calls are placed from mobile phones in South Gate, which has a population that is over 90 percent Hispanic.

In fact, approximately 75 percent of the emergency calls that the South Gate Police Department receives come from mobile phones, said Koomen.

“If you call from a cell phone you need to be prepared to describe your location,” concluded Koomen, adding that callers are always going to be asked to confirm their location, either way to make sure.

Captain Mike Parker, spokesperson for The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, also expressed the belief that landlines are still the better choice over cell phones when making an emergency call.

“Technology is not advanced to the point where we have the immediate availability to determine the exact location of where someone is standing,” said Cpt. Parker. “It takes a lot longer.”

All landlines are also automatically stored into the Los Angeles County Public Alerts systems. This means that law enforcement can also do the reverse of an emergency call and issue direct warnings to residents about reported incidents in their area.

“The thing about regular land phone is that people get benefits they are not aware of,” said Capt. Parker.  “If you do not have hard line you will not get that message, unless you register.”

Despite various pitfalls that cel lphones can have during an emergency call, the Los Angeles County Fire Department, which serves South Gate, does not recommend using a type of phone over the other.

“Either way, we are going to find you,” said John Owens, Battalion Chief of the Fire Command and Control Facility of the Los Angeles County Fire Department, who admitted to not having landline in his home. “The best information will come from the caller, but we have multiple sources to narrow down where people are, if we are not sure.” 

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