Delhi police control room gets one blank call every 1.5 seconds
NEW DELHI: Time was when Delhi police would be swamped with complaints about crank calls. Times now are such that the cops themselves are victims of blank calls. According to Delhi police data, the control room gets one blank call every 1.5 seconds. But funnily, the calls are from people who don't know they have made such a call.
This is because the police control room can be contacted merely by shaking one's mobile phone, pressing the power button twice or punching '9'. It is not known if this works with all handsets across the board.
Also, the common emergency number ‘112’ -- under the Centre's Nationwide Emergency Response System (NERS) -- is keeping operators in the police control room busy. Designed on the lines of 911 in the US, NERS was conceptualized after the December 2012 gangrape in a Delhi bus.
In November, the control room got over 12 lakh calls on 112, of which only 0.1% were crime-related. Sources claimed operators handling these lines were taking calls every second.
“There was a time when the Delhi police control room received two calls every second. In the last week of December last year, it got more than 1 lakh calls in 24 hours. Because of that, we had to shut down the 112 trial run for some time. Recently, it was started again,” an official said.
“The operators remain busy taking blank calls. Seventy per cent of the time, no one replies and when Delhi police call back some of them, they say they were not aware that they had dialled the emergency number," he added.
