If you live in La Mesa and called your police department’s non-emergency line this past week, you may have noticed something new: the voice on the other end wasn’t a person.
As of July 24, the La Mesa Police Department began routing non-emergency calls to an artificial intelligence agent called Hyper. It joins the El Cajon Police Department, which made the same move recently, and the San Diego Sheriff’s Office, which has run Hyper on its non-emergency line since March, handling up to 400,000 calls a year.
I spent 35 years in law enforcement, retiring as a commander with the sheriff’s office. I am not reflexively against technology. But I want to be precise about what these three agencies have done, because the polished press releases skip the part that matters: they have quietly placed a machine between our most vulnerable neighbors and the help they are trying to reach — and they are damaging the community’s trust in the process.
Every agency offers the same reassurance: 911 still goes to a human. True. But “non-emergency” is an administrative label, not a description of who is actually calling. The burglary victim who came home to a ransacked house. The witness to a hit-and-run. The domestic violence survivor reporting that her abuser violated a restraining order last night. The frightened resident reporting a hate crime. None of these people are placing a “routine” call. Yet all of them now reach a chatbot first.
That is not a customer-service problem. It is a public-safety failure in the making, and the research is clear about why. Across contact centers, roughly 85% of callers who don’t reach someone the first time never try again. And help-seeking by crime and abuse victims is far more fragile than that.
Federally funded research by the National Institute of Justice found that “hassle” is one of the core barriers that stops victims from seeking help at all . The same study found the large majority of abused women never contacted an agency in the first place. Crisis-line data shows the same truth from the other direction: when a human answers, people stay on the line; when they hit friction, they hang up. An automated gate is friction, and it lands hardest on exactly the people least likely to call back — the elderly, non-English speakers and residents already wary of police.
Then there is the question no agency here has answered: once the AI records and transcribes your call, who owns that data — and who can reach it?
The answer should alarm every East County resident. Hyper is no longer an independent startup. In April, it was acquired by Motorola Solutions. That is the same company whose subsidiary operates one of the nation’s largest license-plate-reader networks — a network that, by public documentation, shares data with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
ICE’s own privacy assessment acknowledges it can reach that data indirectly, through local agencies connected to the commercial network, allowing federal immigration authorities to access information from jurisdictions that, on paper, restrict sharing it. ICE has held contracted access since 2017, and this spring Motorola was sued in a class action alleging it improperly shared such data with federal immigration enforcement in violation of California privacy law.
Now that same company records and transcribes our non-emergency police calls, in more than thirty languages, including from the immigrant and refugee families who make East County what it is. San Diego’s TRUST Ordinance and California’s Senate Bill 54 exist precisely to keep local policing from becoming a feeder for federal deportation. But those protections mean little if the recordings of victims and witnesses sit inside a commercial network federal agents can already query. No agency here has disclosed the contract terms, the retention schedule, whether our words train these models, or whether federal access is possible. That silence is the story.
And why the rush to automate? Because the sheriff’s office let its human dispatch center fall apart. An inewsource review found Sheriff Kelly Martinez posted the worst 911 answer times of ten county agencies in 2025 — while every other agency met the state standard — even as the county eliminated dispatcher positions and left roughly a fifth of them vacant for years. The department under-staffed the humans, and now offers a machine as the fix. The efficiency numbers they will tout — calls diverted, wait times down — measure speed. They do not measure whether a frightened victim got help, or ever called again.
Before another East County agency signs on, residents deserve straight answers: the contract, the retention policy, the training-data term, and a clear accounting of who can access what we say when we call for help. And victims and witnesses reporting crimes should reach a trained human being — not a bot.
Trust is the whole job. You do not build it by handing the voices of crime victims to an algorithm and refusing to say where they go.
David A. Myers is a retired commander in the San Diego Sheriff’s Office with 35 years of service. He served as director of safety and security at Jewish Family Service of San Diego from 2023 to 2025.
Want to submit a letter to the editor, guest column or opinion piece? Find our guidelines and submission form here.
Hence then, the article about opinion why do machines answer when you call police for help in east county was published today ( ) and is available on Times of San Diego ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Opinion: Why do machines answer when you call police for help in East County? )
Also on site :