Police helpline flooded by hoax calls

Caller tracing, response monitoring to be boosted

LAHORE:

The Punjab Police has decided to upgrade its emergency helpline 15 system to deal with a flood of hoax calls and allegations of poor or delayed response.

The planned initiatives include identification and location of the callers, as well as monitoring of the responding teams.

The helpline had received over 30 million calls across the province during the past year but as many as 20 million of them proved to be fake. The ratio of spurious emergency call received through the helpline during the year was as high as 66 per cent.

According to an official, a number of the phone calls wasting time of the responding staff had been made by children.

When the department traced phone numbers used by children to calls the helpline 15 a few months back, it was revealed that parents often handed over their mobile phones to their children to avoid disturbance from them.

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The children consciously or involuntarily had called the helpline because its number was on the speed dial option.

The police had also shortlisted the repeated fake callers a year earlier. Warning phone calls had bene made to the numbers against the act.

Some first information reports (FIRs) had also been registered against the repeat offenders.

However, the issue remains unresolved and the number of hoax callers has not dropped.

On the other hand, complaints of delayed response by police teams or an inconsiderate response also remained rampant during the year.

For improvement on both fronts, the police top brass has decided to introduce some radical interventions.

A senior officer shared that the interventions being discussed included access to the location of the callers and their identification details.

The details of the subscriber identity module (SIM) card being used by a caller to 15 and its location will also be accessed from the helpline control room.

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Details regarding the responding police teams, their members’ identities and vehicles’ location will also be accessible by the control room.

The citizens would also be enabled to register their feedback about the response and behaviour of the police officials responding to the calls for emergency help, the sources added.

The control room will monitor the response time through the live location details of the police teams from receiving the calls to arriving at the locations of the callers.

Pending investigations

Meanwhile, Capital City Police Officer Bilal Siddique Kamyana instructed investigation officials to expedite the resolution of pending road certificate, electricity theft and ongoing cases.

Presiding over a meeting of senior officers of the investigation wing, he emphasised the importance of timely completion of work by the prosecutors and called for updating the police officers' data in this regard in a software.

The official underscored the pivotal role of the police investigation wing in achieving justice.

He directed the SPs to hold regular meetings with the DSPs and investigation in-charges to ensure investigations based on merit, justice and legal requirements. Kamyana stressed that delivering justice to the victims relied on thorough and quality investigations.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 4^th, 2024.