The Athens Police Department frequently receives misleading calls for service to its dispatch, though not necessarily false
There’s no room to second-guess the thousands of calls for service that come through the Athens Police Department’s dispatch each year.
What officers hear through their radio is exactly what they expect to see when they arrive on scene.
But that’s not always the case. It’s not uncommon for people to call crimes into dispatch that they don’t yet understand — confusing an assault for a fight, sexual offenses for sexual assault or a stolen item for something that’s actually just missing. Sometimes it’s a problem that can be fixed with a few investigative questions on-scene, though it can cause officers to go lights-and-sirens when they don’t have to.
That doesn’t mean that these calls for service are false.
“Someone might call in something as a sex offense,” APD Chief Tom Pyle said. “And we arrive on scene, and they say ‘That person yelled that they wanted to have sex with me.’ Well they weren’t touched, it’s not a sex offense. It’s definitely inappropriate, but not a sex offense.”
But Pyle said the department officers always leave the call report as-is on the annual report, as they still responded to the crime exactly as they would for what the call detailed — whether it’s a domestic violence case that causes them to go sirens-blaring at 60 mph, or something lesser.
That’s why the incident reports on APD’s annual report might not match up to their calls for report.
“We may have a fight listed as a call for service,” Pyle said. “But the report could be listed as an assault.”
But rarely, those calls for service are completely false. That happened with the Ohio University Police Department about a month ago, when a male student reported that he had been robbed and attacked on South Green, when he had actually lost his wallet.
The student was charged with making a false alarm.
“To date this year, we have taken two reports of ‘making false alarms,’” OUPD Lt. Tim Ryan said. “People don’t usually confuse crimes, most of the time they just describe what they’re seeing.”
Pyle said he could only remember one false report in his career, when a woman admitted that she had fabricated her report for sexual assault.
Athens Interim Sheriff Rodney Smith said that investigative questions during the first few minutes of arriving on scene typically flush out if the report matches the call for service. He said that commonly, domestic violence and assault cases are confused — and both require the department to use emergency response.
That doesn’t necessarily burden the department, unless if the call was completely fabricated.
“It’s a waste of taxpayer resources when we could be out investigating a real crime,” Pyle said. “It impacts the community, it’s boy-cries-wolf syndrome. It’s not just costing the department something.”
Matt Cudahy contributed to this report.
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