Abstract:

February, 2001: Callers who reach out and touch City Hall these days are likely to find themselves groping through a bureaucratic thicket. Take the recent experience of Jason Greenwald, a 29-year-old writer and political consultant. He was cruising down La Cienega Boulevard, past the Beverly Center shopping mall, when he saw two delivery trucks parked in the right lane, hampering traffic. So he grabbed his cell phone and dialed 911. “I knew it wasn’t a life-threatening emergency,” Greenwald said, “but I figured I’d start there.” Calling 911 from a cell phone rings the California Highway Patrol, which in this case informed Greenwald that his was not a life-or-death call. Then Greenwald remembered the city’s handy 877-ASK-LAPD number, a new service for nonemergency calls to police that was intended as a stopgap measure until the city completes the 311 system. He got through, and an operator referred him to the city’s Department of Transportation. Then a DOT worker told him he really ought to talk to a different DOT bureau and gave him that number, at which point, Greenwald said, he reached an argumentative clerk who questioned whether Beverly Center was really in Los Angeles.