Precious time and resources are being spent on hoax or inappropriate calls to triple zero, which take up half of all emergency calls directed to police.
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Two thirds of wrong calls are misunderstandings about when to call police, while the rest are mainly deliberate pranks or malicious anti-police sprays, acting officer in charge of ACT Policing operations Sergeant Mike Ward said.
"Of the roughly 2800 calls we get a month, fifty per cent of the time people get it wrong," he said.
"Thirty per cent of calls that we get are from people who have made an honest mistake."
He said the majority of these calls are people reporting crimes that are not life-threatening or time-critical, which should be reported to 131 444. These include people calling in the morning about a car stolen overnight.
"If the bad guy is still there, only then should they call triple zero," Sergeant Ward said.
About forty per cent of all triple zero calls, or one fifth of the false calls, include deliberate time-wasters or malicious callers.
These range from teenagers making prank calls, to people ranting about how much they hate police, to fake bomb threats.
"It is actually an offence to call the triple zero line as a time-waster to do a hoax call," Sergeant Ward said.
This offence leads to heavy fines and a prison sentence of up to three years under commonwealth legislation.
More bizarre examples of inappropriate calls were people who had ran out of credit and asked police to call a taxi, or someone complaining about takeaway food that had been delivered cold and late – and genuinely thought police would help.
Sergeant Ward said police were usually quick to spot a hoax call, but it was sometimes challenging.
"Heavy breathing could be a hoax or it could be someone's last breaths," he said.
"Then we have people who are fixated on certain police officers and might call several times a day ... it is bordering on whether they have a mental illness or are being malicious."
With the high number of hoax or inappropriate calls remaining steady in recent years, Sargent Ward stressed the need for more awareness about the definition of an emergency.
"It has been this way for quite some time," he said.
"It's about education. We have programs in schools like Kenny Koala which might contribute to why kids normally get it right, when it's the older people who are at the other end of the spectrum."
He said there had been some incredible instances where kids had saved people's lives from calling triple zero.
"Maybe we forget when we leave school, or maybe we don't care, I don't know," he said.
But it seems people usually get it right when it comes to seeking firefighters or paramedics.
Acting ESA commissioner Mark Brown said fewer than 100 of 60,000 incidents that emergency services were called to in the last financial year were believed to be hoax calls.
"It is a much smaller issue for us," Mr Brown said.
"But hoax calls still do divert resources away from training and from community engagement activities so it is important that emergency services work with the community and we can't do that effectively if we are chasing those calls."