One of the lessons learned from the botched emergency call to the Israel Police 100 dispatcher by one of the three captives is Israel Police is going to operate a non-emergency number for the public, ‘110’. It is hoped that with the availability of the non-emergency number for questions from citizens or report of non-emergency matters, there will be far less abuse calls to the ‘100’ emergency dispatcher, Israel’s equivalent of America’s ‘911’.
The new 110 operators will be fully operational in the beginning of 2015. It will be the address for all non-emergency inquiries to police. Therefore, if calls are made to 100 for a road closure for example, the 100 dispatcher will pass it to the 110 dispatcher. If however a 110 dispatcher receives an emergency call, s/he will deal with it and it will not have to be passed to the 100 dispatcher.
According to police, over 9 million calls are received annually by ‘100’ emergency dispatchers. In the Central District, about 30% of incoming calls are bogus. Shai Police, which received the call on when the boys were abducted, has a higher incidence of bogus calls annually, 42%.
Seeking to curtail the number of bogus calls placed to police dispatchers, MK (Bayit Yehudi) proposes that making a prank call to a police dispatcher will be equivalent to interfering with a police offer performing his duty and carry the same ramifications under the penal law. He is proposing that a prank caller who is apprehended face a maximum fine of 10,000 NIS as an additional deterrent.
(YWN – Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
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One Response
Why not have a security number for hitchhikers. Before getting into a car, a hitchhiker calls the number and enters the license number of the ride giver, and then gets a confirmation message. If the ride giver objects, that in itself makes him suspect, and the computer could also warn the hitchhiker if the ride giver’s car is listed as stolen. Technically it’s probably pretty easy to set up such a service, doesn’t require an operator, and if a hitchhiker turns up missing, the police have precise info as to when and where he was picked up by what car.