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Note: if you accidentally do this, do not hang up. Calmly tell the operator it was ~~an accident~~ a mistake. Hanging up will send your info to them and they will call back to make sure there isn't an emergency.
Source: I did this exact thing when my phone lagged out during a reboot.
911 dispatcher here
This will depend a bit on agency policies and technological capabilities as well as what emergency info you've filled out on your phone and unable to be shared in an emergency call
At my agency we get a lot of butt dials, our policy for hang ups or open line calls from a cell phone is that as long as we didn't hear anything suspicious (someone yelling, gunshots, etc) we will usually disregard the call. If we have an open line we'll listen for about 30 seconds or so and if nothing sounds off we'll disconnect and continue about our day. If something sounds fishy we'll stay on the line/call back, and we'll send police to the area if we have a good location.
There's a couple exceptions, like certain wifi calling or femtocell setups are treated as being from a landline because we have a solid address, so we'll always dispatch police unless you stay on the line and confirm that there's no emergency.
And our discretion comes into play a bit. We might ignore 1 or 2 hang ups from the same number, especially since the calls may not even ring through to the same calltaker so it may not be obvious we've gotten multiple calls until we've gotten a good handful.
Different agencies policies on that will vary. I know one of our neighboring counties will always send police to the area when they get a hang up whether or not they heard something suspicious.
And as for the information that's shared, by default all we get is your phone number, carrier, which cell tower it hit off of, and an approximate location based on cell tower triangulation (which is kind of hit or miss, sometimes it's really accurate, other times it's basically useless)
If we need to we can contact the phone provider to try to get subscriber info. That can take a while and can be hit or miss too, like if you haven't updated all your information with them, if you're on a family plan with other people, or if you're using a smaller provider that is really just reselling Verizon/T-Mobile/AT&T service, it can make it a little hard to accurately track down who actually owns that phone.
If you've called recently, we can try to look up your information from priors on your phone number.
If you've filled out your emergency/sos info, and enabled it to be shared with us, we can access that, It also often gives us access to a more accurate location for you, but otherwise we only get what you've put in there. If you haven't kept your name, address, emergency contacts, medical info, etc. accurate and up to date there, that's another stumbling block for us. We can sometimes work backwards from what info is there, if we have your name and age we can try to narrow things down, but if you have a common name it can be hard to tell which 27 year old John Smith is the one who called us.
Do with that what you will, fill out your emergency info or don't depending on what you're comfortable sharing with us, consider how it might be used to save your life if you're, for example, in a car crash and too hurt to speak to us, or how an oppressive government might use it to track you down at a protest (from 911 we can't just access data on random people's phones unless they call us, and we can only request a ping on a phone number from your phone company under certain circumstances, and that's a bit of a process and all it returns is your location based on cell tower triangulation, which again isn't always very accurate. Police and certainly the feds have a bit more leeway than we do, though I don't know the extent of that, and if they set up a stingray or similar device I have absolutely no idea what they might be able to access)
My dad was a dispatcher and if your center is anything like his you guys are overworked and overlooked way too often. Thanks for all you do!
I thought it was some kind of law that newer phones have to send accurate GPS coordinates?
I'll be the first to admit I don't know all of the minute technological or legal details about how and why our systems work the way I do. At the end of the day I'm a user of the systems, and not really privy to all of the technical and policy decisions happening behind the scenes.
I believe that handset gps based location is part of the Next Gen 911 (NG911) standards that are in the process of rolling out. Different agencies and corporations that own and maintain the infrastructure are in different stages of implementing that in different places. I don't really know what the timetable is on all of that is, if there even is one, I'm genuinely not sure if there's any set in stone date where everything everywhere must be fully ng911 compliant by then.
The handful of counties around me are definitely in different stages of rolling it out, my dispatch center has had text to 911 capabilities since well before I started there 6 years ago, and I'm pretty sure one of our neighboring agencies only got the ability to handle it within the last 2 years or so. Another neighboring county is or is about to get video capabilities, which we don't have yet.
I suspect that the current state of the regulations is that new phones must have the ability to send that gps data, but I don't think it needs to be turned on by default, and I don't think dispatch centers are required to make use of it yet, but again I'm not sure.
The current state of it where I work is we get it on a lot of our calls but not all. It's also kind of a hacked together system where it comes through on a web page and not directly integrated into our phone or CAD (Computer Aided Dispatch) systems. I believe the new CAD we're upgrading to will have it fully integrated, but last I heard that is probably still a couple years away.
Phone networks are kind of a mess, countless different companies, contractors, and different levels of government, have all been working together (or sometimes against each other depending on your point of view) to patch together old legacy systems to the new stuff coming out- copper, fiber, analog, digital, cellular, satellite, VoIP, etc. And different levels of government have more or less funds available to them and allocate those funds differently, so the wheels of government, as they say, turn slowly. I work in a relatively wealthy county with a pretty large population in a highly developed part of the country, so we're probably towards the leading edge of the new tech rolling out compared to some dispatch center in the backwoods middle of nowhere (I have had to talk to dispatchers all over the country and occasionally even in other countries, there are definitely some with better capabilities than we have, and there are also some where you get the distinct impression that you're talking to one of two old ladies sitting in a trailer behind the police station sharing a carton of Virginia Slims and entering calls into a computer with a faded sticker proudly declaring that it's Y2K ready.)
My local pd sends someone out even if you tell them it was an accident.
This may only be for woman-type people, I don’t know, but the couple times I’ve accidentally called they always sent someone by to talk to me just to make sure I really don’t need them.
Kinda obnoxious, since I would be very unlikely to call the PD even if they were needed (only call the cops if you are ok with the possibility someone innocent will die), but I guess good on them for.. being proactive.. I guess.
Tell them it was a mistake, not an accident lol
I had a friend of mine bump the emergency assistance button in a rental car, and when he told them it was an accident they were like "how bad is anybody hurt?" and all that
I also did this while trying to turn the volume up with the phone in my pocket years ago