Like I said the other day, why does it keep happening?

Houston police have launched an investigation into the 911 center after we began asking questions about one woman’s call for help that went unanswered for hours. The woman and her grandmother tried for an hour to keep a man from breaking through their front door, all the while making 911 calls that seemed to go nowhere.

The weight of the women was used to keep their front door shut.

“It was shaking really hard,” said Britney Keyworth, showing us how she helped hold the door shut. “I thought he was going to get in.”

An angry unknown man was pounding on Keyworth’s grandmother’s door in the middle of the night.

Do that here, and we’re dialing .45-AUTOMATIC. Then we’ll dial 9-1-1 and ask for the ambulance. But these ladies weren’t so equipped. Instead, they did what all good little statist, anti-gun freaks like to tell us all to do. Dialed for help and hunkered down helplessly. Well mostly. They did lean on the door to try and keep him from breaking in.

Fortunately, the lunatic at the door didn’t get in, but just kept pounding on the door. For three hours.

The women began dialing 911, but response from police wasn’t immediate. For the better part of three hours, the man stayed on the doorstep terrorizing the women.

Houston police say the reason for the officers’ delay could be a simple one. Harris County dispatchers didn’t give the call the highest priority.

According to the broadcast version of the story, the ladies’ call was only given a medium priority. Good thing shots weren’t fired or it would be a low priority.

Update: KHOU is also looking into the problems, and it looks a lot worse than a couple of isolated incidents.

The 11 News Defenders have exposed possible trouble with emergency calls for help, discovering thousands of 911 callers might not be getting an answer.

When you need the help of 911, you need it right now, not later.

But that’s what we found, tens of thousands of cases in which emergency operators didn’t answer when they were supposed to.

What’s more, the city isn’t doing much about it.

(EDIT: this was going to be tacked on as an update, but it got too long. I added this much by accident before I realized that. See the next post for the full entry.)