I’m always on the lookout for coverage of defensive gun uses by local media outlets, so when I ran across a story from KXAN-TV in Austin, Texas headlined “Austin woman chases intruder out of home during ‘terrifying’ invasion,” I was definitely intrigued.
The story itself is less about that encounter, though, than the less-than-satisfying response the victim of the home invasion received when she called 911 to report an intruder.
It was last fall when Shayla Worley woke up and realized a stranger was in her home.
KXAN doesn’t even really describe what Worley did, other than to say she “was able to chase the man out of her home” after grabbing her gun. ,
Instead, the news outlet focused on the “disappointing and confusing” experience she had dialing 911 after she’d chased the intruder away.
Worley said the operator asked her if she called police while the man was still inside.
“And the answer was obviously ‘no,’” Worley said. “There was not a single second to pause and call 911.”
That may have been obvious to Worley, but not to the dispatcher, who of course had no knowledge of what was going on except for what Worley was telling her. Having covered defensive gun uses for over 20 years, there have certainly been multiple situations where armed citizens have dialed 911 while intruders were in the home, and have even been forced to act in self-defense while on the phone with dispatchers.
She said the operator told her to call 311 – the non emergency number – and eventually, to file a report online, which Worley said took a couple of hours to complete. Worley said this shocked her and she expected an officer to respond immediately.
I hate to break it to Worley, but that’s not all that unusual either in many departments. If the intruder had still been inside the home, or even if Worley told the dispatcher she could hear him outside her apartment, that would have been treated as a much higher priority than a report of a burglary where the intruder had already fled the scene. At that point, the resident’s life is presumably not in danger, and the limited number of officers assigned to her part of town might have been dealing with more urgent incidents that needed an immediate response.
“You talk about one of the biggest, most traumatizing events is someone in your personal space and in your home,” Chief Lisa Davis said about this case.
Davis said she listened to the 911 call and said Worley noted there wasn’t an active emergency, but Davis said the operator could have asked more questions about the incident to understand the gravity of it.
“So I think it’s just asking more questions on the other end, [learning] what exactly did occur, [saying] we are going to have someone respond, and so those are the kinds of conversations we are having,” Chief Davis explained. “And luckily, this case was resolved and we did make an arrest in it, but the point is how we got there. And did we explain it to the victim enough to make her feel confident? One, that we are going to show up, and this case would be investigated by our burglary unit.”
The chief makes a good point about the communication by the dispatcher. KXAN hasn’t been able to obtain the 911 call, so we can’t hear it for ourselves, but when dealing with someone who’s just experienced a terrifying encounter with a stranger inside their home, we’d expect the person on the other end of the 911 line to at least sound a little empathetic.
What if the dispatcher had said something like, “I know you’re scared, and I’m glad that you’re safe, but based on what you’ve described this is no longer an active emergency and I can’t guarantee that officers will be able to get to you anytime soon,” instead of just dismissing Worley and telling her to call the non-emergency number? It wouldn’t have changed the outcome of the phone call, but Worley would at least have been better informed about why police weren’t going to show up at her home in the next few minutes.
Worley’s story is a good reminder that many law enforcement agencies are still struggling with staffing levels. Even if you do manage to dial 911 while an intruder is in the home, there’s no guarantee that police will be able to respond in time to prevent any harm from coming to residents, and that’s in the best of times.
Your safety is ultimately your responsibility. I’m very glad that Worley had already decided to take the step of exercising her Second Amendment rights before that stranger broke into her home, and I hope that by sharing her experience others will do the same.
Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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