A message that never loses its importance... Yesterday emergency call handlers received in excess of 30 consecutive emergency calls from a teenager who wanted to wage her own personal ‘rage against the machine’ by making abusive and threatening comments to our call handlers. During the course of her nuisance calls we also received a real emergency call from a woman reporting that her ex-partner was forcing his way into her home, she only had around 5 seconds speak to the call handler and tell us where she was before the call cut out, the consequences should our call handler have been delayed in answering this call by just 5 seconds could have resulted in Police having no address to go to and possibly tragic results for the victim. Another regular annoyance for our call handlers is persons dialling 999 to refresh their mobile network signal and believing that if they hang up quickly then it won’t be routed to the emergency services, wrong. BT will connect a dropped 999 call to Police which will tie up our call handler with trying to call you back and running checks to try to locate you and make sure you are safe. Signal problem? Call your voicemail, not 999. Hoax and nuisance calls to the emergency services still happen and could have real life consequences on real people. 999 is for life and death emergencies or where there is a crime in progress that needs the Police to get there immediately. A 15 year old female was arrested on suspicion of misuse of the emergency communications network.
Posted on: Tue, 10 Jun 2014 16:55:21 +0000