In 1999 a veteran officer was shot and killed near Saint Joseph, Missouri, after stopping a motorist suspected of stealing gasoline from a filling station. The motorist had an outstanding missing person and caution record entered in the National Crime Information Center’s system at the time of the stop. The officer called the license number into the dispatch center, and the dispatcher retrieved the information from NCIC in nine seconds. But because the dispatcher was also responding to inquiries from four other officers at the time, two and a half minutes passed before the dispatcher attempted to contact the officer. By then, the officer had been fatally shot.