More than one mil­lion prank or nui­sance phone calls were made to the Trinidad and To­ba­go Po­lice Ser­vices’ emer­gency com­mand cen­tre (E999) last year.

Sgt Steve Mc Ken­zie of the TTPS re­vealed the sta­tis­tics yes­ter­day as he spoke about the type of calls made to E999 for 2018.

Mc Ken­zie said a to­tal of 1,139,798 calls were made to E999 for the pe­ri­od Jan­u­ary 1 to De­cem­ber 31, 2018.

Of that fig­ure 1,007,835 were ei­ther “prank, nui­sance, or idle type tele­phone calls,” which in­clud­ed heavy breath­ing, gig­gling and the giv­ing of false in­for­ma­tion, Mc Ken­zie said.

This means that more than eight out of every 10 phone calls re­ceived by E999 last year were prank or nui­sance calls.

On­ly 131,963 of the calls made to E999 last year were le­git­i­mate emer­gen­cies that re­quired po­lice in­ter­ven­tion or as­sis­tance, ac­cord­ing to the sta­tis­tics, Mc Ken­zie said.

The trend has not changed much for the first four months of this year.

Be­tween the pe­ri­od Jan­u­ary 1 to April 30, 2019, there were a to­tal of 322,600 calls to E999. Of that amount, 274,173 were prank or nui­sance calls.

On­ly 48,427 of those calls were le­git­i­mate calls that re­quired po­lice as­sis­tance or in­ter­ven­tion, Mc Ken­zie said.

Mc Ken­zie said E999 has the abil­i­ty to trace phone calls, un­like 555 which al­lows for callers to give anony­mous tips.

“For E999 calls there is caller id and num­bers can be traced and very of­ten when we choose to pros­e­cute those per­sons who make prank calls, or give mis­in­for­ma­tion in calls we would use that same tech­nol­o­gy to our ad­van­tage,” Mc Ken­zie said.

Peo­ple who make prank or nui­sance calls to E999 can be charged, Mc Ken­zie said. Un­der Sec­tion 106 of the Sum­ma­ry Of­fences Act, peo­ple can be changed for Mis­use of a tele­phone which car­ries a fine of $200 or a month in prison.

They can al­so be charged for waste­ful em­ploy­ment of po­lice time un­der Sec­tion 6 of the Crim­i­nal Law Act which car­ries a fine of $1,000 or six months in prison.

Mc Ken­zie said, while the TTPS does not pros­e­cute all the prank callers, a “high num­ber” have been charged so far, in­clud­ing re­peat of­fend­ers.

“We have to pri­ori­tise what we do be­cause of the high num­bers,” Mc Ken­zie said.

With the Ju­ly/Au­gust school va­ca­tion in a cou­ple of months, Mc Ken­zie said he ex­pects a rise in the num­ber of prank calls to E999.

He, how­ev­er, urged those think­ing of mak­ing prank calls to re­con­sid­er their ac­tions be­cause of the ad­verse ef­fect it has on po­lice work.

“We ex­pect that as school is com­ing to a close the fig­ures nor­mal­ly raise so we are ask­ing that the idle calls like the per­sons who will be con­tribut­ing to­ward these calls to err on the side of cau­tion,” he said.