Police in Derbyshire receive nearly 5,000 abandoned 999 calls in just one month

Police received one abandoned 999 call roughly every ten minutes last month, according to new figures.

Derbyshire Constabulary’s control room in Ripley received 4,535 abandoned calls last month – where the dialler hangs up before the call has been answered.

The force is now asking members of the public to stay on the line, even if it isn’t an emergency, to prevent staff from spending valuable time investigating if the person is safe.

Each time a call is dropped, call handlers have to ascertain whether an individual is in danger – because whilst many will be pocket dials, some will be about genuine emergencies.

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Inspector Mat Haslam, force incident manager, said: “With every abandoned call, we need to check on the caller’s welfare, which means in some cases, we’ll dispatch an officer to find them.

“Call handlers will try to phone the person back, but if they can’t get through, they’ll contact their network supplier to pinpoint where they are.

“We can’t assume that the person is okay – and every second counts in an emergency.”

The control room takes an average of 1,400 calls for service a day via 999, the non-emergency 101 number and digital channels.

Every contact goes through a threat, risk and harm assessment which leads to that call being prioritised accordingly.

As previously reported, mental health calls to Derbyshire Police have shot up by almost 250%.

Freedom of information data released by Derbyshire Police shows there were 1,795 such calls in 2011, compared to a figure of 6,255 in 2021 – a rise of 248%.

Inspector Haslam continued: “Phone users usually hang up quickly out of embarrassment – but what we want you to do is stay on the line and speak to us.

“We fully understand that accidental dials like this happen to everyone at some point. The key thing is letting us know you’re safe.

“So help us out, stay on the line and have a quick chat and tell us what’s happened, then we can close the call. We’d much rather spend a couple of minutes chatting to you than an hour tracking you down.”