To Protect And Serve? Police Constabulary Ignores 600 Emergency Calls A Year

Today it has been revealed that a British police constabulary ignored almost 600 emergency calls last year, around 50 each month and more than one per day.

According to a Freedom of Information (FOI) request by a Scottish newspaper, the figures show that police constabularies in Moray and Aberdeen failed to send assistance to 583 emergency calls between April 2014 and March 2015.

www.acclaimednews.com... tect-and-serve-police-constabulary-ignores-600-emergency-calls-a-year.html

a reply to: newsaddict
I've seen other stories about the absurd "emergency" calls which people have sometimes made.
Maybe the two things are connected.

a reply to: DISRAELI

I am sure that is the case..

I would imagine our jurisdiction "ignores" hundreds if not thousands of "emergency" calls as well..

People call for the dumbest reasons

originally posted by: DISRAELI
a reply to: newsaddict
I've seen other stories about the absurd "emergency" calls which people have sometimes made.
Maybe the two things are connected.

Exactly right. Without a breakdown of the seriousness of the calls nothing can be claimed. And I'm quite sure that the records are kept and can be subjected to a through wringing out if the will was there to determine either fault or common sense.

Were these duplicate calls about the same event? Were they repeat calls between the event happening and the first police officers arriving? Aberdeen isn't that big - a single city about three miles in radius. You can walk from downtown to the countryside within an hour.

a reply to: newsaddict

Although I am not often one to support any element or suggestion of lackadaisical or slovenly response from our constabularies here in the UK, I have to lend my weight to the "hold your horses, not all is as it seems" camp here.

You will note that the piece in the article you linked to truncates at the point where the spokesperson for the constabulary was saying that there are several reasons for the failure to attend, having just pointed out the process which determines the urgency and severity of the situation, in order to prioritise response to incidents in an effective manner.

The piece could have continued from there, but did not, it just left the detail hanging. I get the impression that more was said by the spokesperson, than was published in the online article to which you linked, and that the piece was designed to leave people wondering, more than it was designed to explain the situation in an unbiased manner.

Now, with that said, six hundred calls is a fairly big number, but not statistically relevant, although the relevance of statistics to the victim of a crime or serious incident is virtually nil as well. It is vital that we understand this crucial point however, before forming opinions based on such little detail as we have at the moment:

For proper opinion to be formulated on this subject, a case by case review of each failure to attend would have to be enacted, to establish whether the failure to attend a particular shout was justifiable either because of the nature of the incident itself ("Hello? Yes, my microwave won't open and give me my dinner"), or because the incident being reported, though serious, was not serious enough to divert officers from a more serious matter. So for example, a person calling to report a prowler, while a manhunt for a murder suspect seen with a gun goes on across the other side of the county, for example.

There are many instances where the police get things straight up wrong, and many of those instances are a result of institutional failings, and the failure of the law to adequately protect the people of this nation. However, it is important to ensure the validity of any negative opinion related to this specific topic, otherwise all we have is senseless cop bashing, which, thought tempting at times, achieves very little of any worth.

a reply to: newsaddict

Question -

here in the states police do not have a duty to protect the individual but society as a whole.

is it the same there?

We were attacked at knife point by 6 people at a corner store and called 911, said they had better things to do and weren't going to hurry to help. They ran the plates on the vehicle and they said the car was from somewhere too far away to have done the crime.

Then they came and threatened to arrest us for public intoxication when the assaulters weren't there anymore. All we wanted was cheap nachos after leaving the bar and the police treated us like criminals.

a reply to: Xcathdra

Problem with that is obviously, if they don't protect the individual, or ignore a "prank" call, if it's true then you're looking a lawsuit that is going to be upheld in court.

a reply to: ghaleon12

It's been done several times.. Always to no avail..

The Supreme Court has ruled numerous times that the Police have no legally binding obligation to protect any one or any group of individuals..

I reported a teenager climbing through an upstairs window of a property by standing on the roof of the stormporch. I told them that I think he might live there and locked himself out, but I was reporting it just in case. They told me I was doing the right thing. Police attended not 3 minutes later, complete with flashing blue lights (although no siren). They confirmed that he lived there and locked his keys inside.

The neighbours all called me names, but the police told them to shut it, I had done the correct thing. I didn't know the lad, I had just seen someone climbing in an upstairs window and correctly reported it.

Anyway, the point I'm making, is the police aren't in generally lazy. They respond to every call they can, but they do ignore reports that are obviously not an emergency, or wrongly reported, or duplicate reports. Those will have been included in that FOIA report. Without knowing WHY the police chose to ignore the reports, the data in itself is largely worthless.

Also bear in mind, the police are HUMAN, and sometimes they make mistakes and consider a report less urgent than it actually is. Likewise they sometimes consider a report more urgent than it actually is.

a reply to: semperfortis

Find that hard to believe, since in medicine if you show up at an ER and they don't treat you, and get injured, a lawsuit is inevitable.