www.astralcodexten.com/p/record-low-crime-rates-are-real-not
1 correction found
did you know that the 9-1-1 emergency hotline wasn’t available in most areas until the 1970s?
This is misleading/incorrect: 9-1-1 was not available to a majority of Americans until the late 1980s, not the 1970s.
Full reasoning
The post implies that by the 1970s, 9-1-1 had become available in “most areas” (i.e., broadly/majority coverage). But historical accounts of 9-1-1 rollout show that adoption was still limited through the 1970s, and that majority access wasn’t reached until around 1987–1988.
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The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History recounts that the first 9-1-1 call was in 1968, and that “Twenty years later, only half the U.S. population had access to a 9-1-1 system.” Twenty years after 1968 is 1988, which directly contradicts the idea that “most areas” had 9-1-1 by the 1970s.
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A separate historical summary (FireRescue1, citing NENA/other references) quantifies the slow rollout: 17% coverage by 1976, 26% by 1979, and only after that did it reach ~half (it says the 1979 figure “doubled by 1987”). That again indicates that the 1970s were well below ‘most areas’ coverage.
So, while it’s true that 9-1-1 started in 1968 and expanded over subsequent decades, the specific phrasing “wasn’t available in most areas until the 1970s” is inconsistent with the documented timeline showing majority availability only around the late 1980s.
2 sources
- “This is 9-1-1. What is your emergency?”: A history of raising the alarm | National Museum of American History (Smithsonian)
“Twenty years later, only half the U.S. population had access to a 9-1-1 system.”
- 50+ years in the making: ‘911, what’s your emergency?’ | FireRescue1
“911 services reached only 17 percent of the population by 1976. In 1979, 26 percent of the population had access, and that number doubled by 1987.”