17th December, 2019
A woman’s call in Dubai is now the poster crank call being used by the emergency call centre, on what an emergency call should never be.
The unidentified woman sometime this year rang 999 that she had an emergency at home. Responders were shocked on reaching her to find that the fuss was over a dirty cat that sat on her air conditioning unit.
Her call was one of the crank calls the Sharjah Police said it received this year, out of 1.2million calls, up till September.
The Gulf Times reported that the woman’s call is now being used as the poster call for crank calls by people using the emergency numbers.
The police are not happy with the misuse of the number.
Colonel Jassim Bin Hada, Director of the Control Room at the Operations Department at Sharjah Police has appealed to residents not to misuse the number.
“We received a number of calls on the emergency number for general inquiries, wrong numbers or bogus emergencies which placed an extra and unnecessary strain on emergency resources,” he said.
“When you call for a general inquiry, you are holding up the line and a person in a serious accident may not be able to reach the police,” he said.
“This is the biggest problem we face as a police operations room,” he added, citing that 999 was for emergencies and 901 was for non-emergencies.
In each shift, which lasts eight hours, police receive 900 to 1,000 calls on 999, but only 200-250 are genuine emergencies. The rest are transferred to the non emergency 901 number, which was launched in 2015 to relieve the burden on 999.