Why would the police dial 911 from Martin's phone?
As I stated earlier, it's possible that was when Police finally got around to dealing with his phone. (5 days later) It was in custody, as I understand.
It might have been to get the number? Supposition at this point.
Within the exact minute a phone call outbound to 911 was placed, an incoming came in from Sanford police department. 12:45PM. According to Trayvon's phone records.
I've thought about your suggestion. But I'm not sure it makes sense in the grand scheme of things. First of all, 911 dispatch centers and police work closely together, but they don't generally work at adjacent desks, if you get my meaning. It's like working in the psyche ward and calling the ER to get them to read the number off the caller ID.
Second, I would think that police officers would tend to frown upon what is essentially abusing the 911 system. Nowadays, emergency response systems are increasingly frustrated by people who call 911 for non-emergency purposes, to include requests for police to respond to possible crime, etc, because of the fact that 911 centers have become so incredibly over-burdened with calls. In many areas, local governments are going to great lengths to make non-emergency numbers known, with most police departments having easy to remember non-emergency numbers, such as "1111" or "0000" or something similar. The trend is to leave 911 more for medical and fire emergencies, and I would expect police departments to have policies in place that would frown upon calling 911 from a phone being held as evidence, and expect that a police officer would be more likely to call their personal cell phone to check the caller ID.
Third, I would think that there being two incoming calls from the Stanford PD suggests that the purpose was not to confirm the number of the phone. After all, it only takes once. So I would expect some different explanation of the records.
Alternatively, I could find it plausible for an officer to power up this phone while still in panic mode, try to dig into the info saved in the phone to identify the number, and inadvertently call 911. They'd, of course, hang up once they realized what they were doing, but would likely invoke a response from the 911 operator to report the cut off call, prompting an immediate report over to the police side of the building, and a subsequent call back. Most of the time, if you call 911 and immediately hang up, you'll be receiving a call back almost immediately to attempt to determine if there's an emergency that you're having difficulty reporting, or also if you're being a prankster.
Again, this is all a big hypothesis at this point. I'll be curious to see if more information eventually comes out about it.
