It's a hoax! Prank calls taxing emergency services
Published:Sunday | March 6, 2011 | 12:00 AM
Anastasia Cunningham, Senior Gleaner Writer
Both the 110 fire service and the 119 police emergency phonelines have had to deal with the overwhelming issue of prank calls over the years, which is taxing these systems set up to deal specifically with urgent situations.
Taini Ricketts, the police emergency call centre manager, said they get approximately 30,000 calls per day and, of that number, 75 per cent are non-emergencies.
"Persons call because they are lonely, kids being prompted by their parents, kids need help with their homework. We also get calls from a lot of perverts. It really does require a lot of patience to deal with these calls," said Ricketts.
She said, in one instance, a child called to say his father was going to shoot him. They could hear a male in the background saying 'tell dem mi a go kill yuh now', then the person went 'pow, pow' and the child said 'him shot mi! him shot mi!'. The male was then heard laughing in the background.
Karl Angell, the Jamaica Constabulary Force's director of communications, said, over the years, they have tried various means to curtail the problem and let people appreciate that the 24-hour service is for emergencies only and when people call for no good reason they are hampering the police's response to genuine needs.
He said hoax calls usually spike after 2 p.m. when school is dismissed, with an influx from young people. Later in the nights, the prank callers tend to be older and more abusive. He said people call just to tell the police inde-cent language, hang up, send them on a wild goose chase, ask questions, say something arbitrary, among other things.
Angell said the main thing the police can do to curtail the problem is to increase public education and they have been going into the schools to let the children understand the purpose of 119.
Fire brigade
Laurie Williams, commissioner of the Jamaica Fire Brigade, said prank calls put his grossly under-resourced department under a lot of pressure.
"The stress level on the staff, consuming unnecessary fuel, damage to the vehicles and taking us away from a genuine fire, especially since we have limited service vehicles, is very costly," said Williams.
Examining the statistics over the last three months of calls received at the 33 fire stations across the island, Williams said in February, of the 1,414 emergency calls, 171 were hoax. In January, 153 of the 866 emergency calls were pranks, while in December last year 137 of the 560 calls were false alarms.
Williams said the main reasons found for false calls to the fire department include testing their response time, checking to see if they would come to that community if there was a real fire and to get water from the truck, as the area had none.
Another key organisation that has been traditionally plagued with prank calls was the Centre for the Investigation of Sexual Offences and Child Abuse. However, Deputy Superintendent Gloria Davis Simpson said since taking up command in October of last year, all the calls coming into the unit have been genuine.
Seeking attention
There are also several anecdotal stories of people calling in bomb threats to government and corporate officers, shutting down operations for hours.
But what would prompt someone to pull off prank calls?
According to psychologist Dr Barry Davidson, the psychological profile of persons who perpetrate a hoax fall into one of four categories.
"Ruling out the person who is mentally disturbed, suffering some sort of schizophrenia or illusion, you are left with a revengeful person who wants to embarrass someone, not thinking of the consequences of the situation, but only of appeasing themselves," said Davidson.
He said there was also the person who was bored, just doing it for fun without perceiving the implications. And finally, someone seeking attention, "the person doing something they know was wrong, and know they will probably be punished for it, but to them it's the only way to get noticed," said the psychologist.