Inebriated people desiring to vent their frustration, residents harrowed by noise during festivals, people with a knack for verbal abuse -- these are some of the callers the Mumbai police control attends to on a daily basis, with a volume of hundreds of calls at any given point of time.
"Mumbai police receive almost 43,000 calls on an average every day. Of the 43 thousand calls, almost 50 per cent calls are either blank calls, drunk calls, or calls that do not result in any intervention from police or are the result of wrong or mistaken dialers," said a police source.
According to statistics provided by the Mumbai police in an RTI filed by activist Shakeel Ahemad Shaikh, the control room has received 74.14 lakh calls in 2016, whereas in 2017, the number of calls was 1.58 crore, which is a 120 per cent increase.
Out of the 1.58 crore calls received by the Mumbai police control room in 2017, around 70 lakh calls were received only between September and December. The high number of calls, police claim, is due to the festive season which causes noise pollution due to firecrackers, loudspeakers in pandals and traffic jams.
Mumbai police's control room, refurbished not very long ago, is situated at its headquarters in Crawford Market and has 48 employees who attend to calls and guide citizens in 12-hour shifts. At any given point in time, the control room is engaged with over a 100 calls, with half of them being in waiting.
"Daily, we receive around 300 to 400 calls from people who want to discuss their issues for which they should be approaching civil courts instead of the police," said a police officer. "We get several calls from people who are inebriated and abuse our responders. There are also people who complain about autorickshaw drivers rejecting their fare or asking for extra money. We attend those calls too and try to solve these issues. However, we disconnect the calls of abusers and drunkards and do not take any action against them unless they do it repeatedly," the officer said.
There are a few regular callers who make drunk calls during the night, convinced that police will hear out their grievances. "There are some regulars who like to talk about their problems for half an hour. But we have instructions to resolve a caller's issue within three minutes," said the officer.
