By Jessica A. York, Vallejo Times Herald (California)

Vallejo police plan to teach residents to admit their mistakes, or pay if they don’t.

Starting Oct. 1, trying to pretend an accidental 911 call never happened could result in a $200 bill.

On that day, the Vallejo Police Department will roll out its 911 Response Recovery Program, approved by the City Council for use two years ago.

The fee is intended to drive home a forceful lesson to the thousands of people who accidentally call police every year, then fail to stay on the line to explain their error or refuse to answer when concerned police dispatchers call back.

Police support services division’s Lt. Jim O’Connell said the goal is to reduce the number of hang-up calls that unnecessarily require two-officer teams to respond to each instance. The fee is not, he said, to make people afraid to call 911.

“A lot of this is common sense. You can call 911 by accident, (dispatchers) call you back, (you) pick up the phone and say, ‘I’m sorry, it was an accident,’ ” said O’Connell. “We want people to continue to use 911 for emergencies. … We want to keep resources available for real emergencies.”

Police department staffing has reached a low enough level that the new fee was seen as a way to reduce needless police response, O’Connell said. He could not provide an estimate of the fiscal impact of the false calls, but said the bigger cost is having too few officers available to respond to true emergencies when needed.

The program will be billed through the same company that administers the city’s false security alarm program, CryWolf.

Officers will decide with each incident whether the call was a false call.

Appeals to the bill will be reviewed by Communications Manager Aimee Crutcher, whose contact information will be included on each fee notice.

The department receives about 4,500 hang-up calls on its 911 line annually, Crutcher said. That number excludes the ever-growing number of cell phone hang-ups, and does not differentiate between callers who did or did not respond when dispatchers call back.

“We always call back,” Crutcher said of dispatcher response. “And if the line is busy because they don’t have call waiting, we break through with the operator.”

O’Connell agreed, saying his staff takes “fairly extraordinary measures” to determine if the call is truly an emergency.

Exempted from the fine will be cell phone hang-up callers who police are unable to trace, large businesses stemming from a central call, and those that fess up to the mistake, O’Connell said.

The department will ease the program in with a 30-day grace period, when warning letters will be sent out in place of the bills.

For more information on the 911 Response Recovery Program, visit the city’s information page online, at www.crywolf.us/vallejo911misuse.

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