A SPIDER IN YOUR ROOM -- CALL 911? LAPD INUNDATED WITH NONSENSE.

Byline: BRENT HOPKINS Staff Writer

The call came in, answered deep inside the LAPD's Communications Center. A breathless caller nervously spoke.

An armed intruder -- eight-armed, in fact -- had invaded her home, and she needed the police to apply lethal force. A highly trained dispatcher fielded the call and determined the assailant was an arachnid.

``No kidding, a spider,'' said Lt. Chuck Mealy, the assistant commanding officer of the LAPD's Communications Division.

``The dispatcher's asking, `Why don't you kill it or chase it outside?' She says, `It's a big spider. It might be a flying spider.' Eventually, we got the paramedics involved and they told her `We don't come out on spiders. You're going to have to find someone else to kill it for you.'''

The demand to dispose of the menacing, possibly airborne creature was hardly unusual.

The Los Angeles Police Department received 1.7 million calls last year through the 911 emergency system and 1.5 million more via its nonemergency numbers.

This year, it already has logged more than 1.2 million on both, and the number will likely increase when it picks up cell phone calls from the California Highway Patrol in December.

No specific statistics exist on the number of spurious calls, like the wayward spider, but Mealy said as many as 70 percent are non-life- threatening. They're so frequent, dispatchers don't even track the number of wasted calls.

They come in at all hours of the day. Anonymous complaints about neighbors' loud rap music or overly enthusiastic lovemaking. Parents angry at kids who won't go to school or get off the phone. A rant about the poor quality of television programming these days. An embarrassing sexually transmitted disease. An inquiry for the phone number for Pizza Hut on Alvarado Street.

The LAPD alone fields 6,000 to 8,000 calls daily at its center downtown and 3,000 more in West Hills.

The Los Angeles Fire Department deploys units on roughly 2,000 incidents a day, but handles more calls than that. An hour without a nonsense call is cause for celebration.

``The weight upon us is overwhelming,'' said Brian Humphrey, a Fire Department spokesman. ``Someone calls 911 and says, `I've got little green men coming out of my sink.' Maybe they've got psychoses, maybe they're a diabetic with low blood sugar.

``We always respond with an abundance of caution, so five minutes after they hang up the phone, they've got a cadre of well-trained responders there to help them. Unfortunately, it's the rest of the people of Los Angeles who then pay the price.''

The LAPD takes the majority of 911 calls within the county, answering nearly 91 percent within its goal of 10 seconds. Currently, the CHP fields cell phone calls but will hand off most nonfreeway calls to the LAPD in coming months.

Last year, when it still handled all of the county's cell calls, it got 1.2 million, as many as 15 percent of which turned out to be not even vague emergencies.

Cell phones also presented a unique challenge for the CHP stemming from the phenomenon known either as ``phantom calls,'' or ``butt calls.''

The latter involve a caller involuntarily dialing the emergency number by sitting on their phone's keypad, leaving the operator listening to muffled noise.

Prior to implementing a system requiring callers to press a button or acknowledge they intended to call 911, rumps and other accidental calls rang up 25 percent of the call volume.

And even when it's a different sort of rear-end on the line, the calls still don't necessarily pass muster. Like the guy who wanted to know if the CHP had any Aston Martins in service so he could get an opinion before he bought one. Or the customer who hadn't quite gotten it their way.

``We had one where they were literally in a drive-through burger place and they'd gotten upset with the attendant,'' said Capt. Steve Webb, commander of the CHP's Los Angeles Communications Center.

``They weren't getting satisfaction with what they'd ordered, so they wanted us, the CHP, to intervene to make sure they got their milkshake and Double Whopper. And they're very serious about this.''

brent.hopkins(at)dailynews.com

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Who to call

If you don't have a life-threatening emergency, authorities encourage the use

of these numbers instead of 911:

211: Health and Human Services. Callers can find information on clinics, jobs, employment and crisis counseling. It can also be accessed by dialing [phone] or visiting 211LA.org.

311: Los Angeles City Hall. Handles complaints on potholes, fallen trees, burned-out street lights. Also can refer callers to local fire or police stations.

877-ASK-LAPD: Nonemergency police contact number.

611: Telephone repair.

711: Relay service for deaf or hard of hearing.

On cell phones, #399: Nonemergency motorist breakdown. If you're blocking traffic on the freeway, however, you should still call 911.

Sources: Los Angeles Fire Department and California Highway Patrol.

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