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What should I do if I find a bag by the road that I'm concerned it's a dead body? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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So I was walking and found this garbage bag that had flys on it and it was tied up. I kicked at it a bit and it did feel like something limp was in there like it was dead. Tried to untie it as well so might have my fingerprints on it. But yeah a car came up and was yeah someone actually concerned for me and he's like I'm going to pray for you man. So that right there just got me to stop looking any further at the bag. But I'm still kinda of interested if I should've said something right then and there. My phone was almost dead anyway. But yeah I was thinking maybe I might find a dead body maybe a part of a dead body. I didn't look any further but it was out of place I felt. Should I report such finds?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Another thing that just occurred to me, is that if we harp on people too hard about only calling 911 when it's a "real" emergency, they start getting paranoid and are reluctant to call sometimes when they really should call

I've seen it happen in person, one time I was over my friend's house and we had a short but really intense storm roll through. We look outside and a big tree on his property is leaning and very obviously about to fall over the road and probably take down some wires.

He starts talking about calling the township and the electric company and like 3 other agencies to get it taken care of and starts looking up phone numbers.

And I'm there telling him to just call 911. I get about 50 calls just like that every time there's a storm, it's not a big deal- you know your address, your cross streets, what town you live in, you're not a moron and not freaking out and can explain the issue intelligibly and succinctly, so you're better than like 70% of the calls I get on any given day, the entire call will last you like 30 seconds. We have all the contact info to get anything we need out there to deal with it and can do it blindfolded because we do it every time there's a storm.

And even with a 911 dispatcher, standing there telling him to just call 911, he was really reluctant to do it because to him it wasn't a "real emergency"

And of course everyone has a different threshold for what a "real" emergency is. I'll get people calling in cool as a cucumber to calmly report that their daughter just got stabbed like it's something that just happens to them every other Tuesday, and I'll get people losing their minds like it's the end of the world as we know it because some road construction is too loud (and of course that same person would probably call in just as angry that there's a pothole in the road and they're angry it hasn't been fixed yet)

I have a thousand other stupid reasons people called, some came in on non emergency lines, some on 911, and just as many stories of people who called in actual emergencies on a non emergency line for one reason or another.