Muskego Police Department is telling residents to stop calling 9-1-1

WAUKESHA COUNTY, WI — A battle is raging in one Waukesha County city over who should answer 9-1-1 cell phone calls and whether or not people should even bother to call 9-1-1.

Waukesha County currently answers all 9-1-1 calls made from cell phones.

Muskego would like to answer their own calls. And now as the two sides try to work that out, the Muskego Police Department is telling residents to stop calling 9-1-1 from their cell phones and instead call the local non-emergency number, (262) 679-4130.

Several officials Newsradio 620 WTMJ’s John Mercure  spoke with say that is dangerous.

Richard Tuma is the Director of Emergency Preparedness for Waukesha County and told Newsradio 620 WTMJ, “I think it’s just ludicrous, public safety officials for years and years and years have promoted the use of 9-1-1 for a number of reasons. One, it is a direct connect to a dispatch center that can dispatch you. It provides data, your phone number and your location… the dispatch center has enough data to call back and find out what is going on…”

Captain John LaTour is with the Muskego Police Department and he doesn’t consider this measure dangerous, in fact he told Newsradio 620 WTMJ, “The bottom line is… we can take our calls directly. We can save on the average of 73 seconds based on a study that we did.”

LaTour reviewed their data and said that dialing the non-emergency number would have saved about 73 seconds on a traffic accident Thursday afternoon in Muskego.

Read the story here.

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