Hoax 999 callers a nuisance on busiest night

Figures released by South Yorkshire Police show that on the busiest night of the year, police were inundated with nuisance calls.

A woman described as ‘hysterical’ rang 999 after a taxi driver asked her to pay her fare up front, while another rang with the noise of a loud house party in the background, claiming he was Frank Gallagher from the television drama Shameless.

A man called police to ask if officers could drive his drunken girlfriend home and another caller rang to say he'd lost his house keys.

There were also false reports of crime, which took up valuable police.

One 18-year-old man rang 999 saying that a car had driven at him, knocked him over and driven off at speed. Police graded the call as an immediate response, the highest level of priority, but found the teenager with no injuries.

He had apparently made the story up.

Another man claimed he had been assaulted, although he had actually fallen down the stairs.

Tracy Potter, operations manager at South Yorkshire Police, said: “There were 572 calls to 999 between midnight and 5am, generating a total of 737 incidents.

“Of these, 219 were immediate and 123 were priorities for police officers to attend.

“The majority of incidents related, as expected, to alcohol-fuelled incidences of fighting and domestic incidents.

“Overall, it was a busy start to the New Year...what we could have done without were the nuisance and hoax calls made by people who obviously had nothing better to do on New Year's Eve than waste police time and, potentially, prevent us from getting to a serious incident as quickly.”