Dubai: Dubai Police revealed that only 18 per cent of the more than 2.9 million calls that the emergency 999 number received in 2014 were actual emergencies.
Brigadier Omar Al Shamsi, Deputy Director of the Operations Department, said that the operations room at Dubai Police received almost three million calls last year, a noticeable increase from 2013, when they received more than 2.5 million calls.
“Our target is to answer calls to 999 within 10 seconds or three rings. Last year we answered 98 per cent of our calls within the target,” Brig Al Shamsi said.
Even with the increase in the population and calls received by the operations room, he said, they still maintain their target.
Although the operations room receives many non-emergency calls, the operators try to help the caller. “We trained the operators to be polite to people and try to help even if it’s not an emergency.”
“People calling 999 for non-emergency situations is a problem that still persists, even with the many awareness campaigns telling people to call 901 for inquiries or non-emergencies. It was also reported by the media many times, but people still do it,” Brig Al Shamsi said.
In 2014, only 103,398 calls were serious emergencies, he said, of which the majority were reports of moderate to serious traffic accidents, while 231,903 calls were minor traffic accidents.
He explained that people calling with non-emergencies waste the time and effort of the officers at the operations room, who could be attending to people with serious emergencies.
“We have created 901 for the sole purpose of helping people with their general inquiries. We even devised tools, which are not available to 999, to provide people with the information they want. For example, the caller can choose whether they’d like us to SMS, e-mail or fax them the information they want.”
Brig Al Shamsi added that he is pushing to unify all emergency numbers in the UAE to 999, as currently 997 is the number to call in case of a fire and 998 is the ambulance emergency number. “Why confuse people when they are already panicking in the case on an emergency?”
People can reach 999 in three different ways, by calling, sending an SMS or using the SOS feature on the Dubai Police app.
“We introduced the SMS feature last year because we thought of people who are hearing and speech impaired.”
