The City of Cape Town has a ‘little’ problem with prank callers. The worst of them are received by the City’s Public Emergency Communications Centre, who get around 280 prank calls a day.

Mayoral Committee Member for Safety and Security, JP Smith said:

The calls range from emergency hoaxes to the vilest verbal abuse, but also, more disturbingly, calls of a very perverse nature.

It is unacceptable that our operators who are there to do a very serious job have to endure this type of abuse with no recourse except to cut the call. It is also very unfair and potentially life-threatening to people with real emergencies who cannot get through or who are kept waiting because pranksters are clogging the lines.

On a day-to-day basis, around 532 682 calls were answered by emergency operators in 2015 and get this, around 102 217, or 20%, were prank calls.

Although children are routinely blamed for the calls, adults also abused the system, often with sexually explicit calls. Obviously:

Our system allows us to pick up exactly where the call is coming from, but it’s tricky when the perpetrator is using a public telephone.

I have instructed the City’s Special Investigations Unit to extract information on the top 10 habitual offenders and lay charges in terms of national legislation that makes such prank and hoax calls to an emergency call centre an offence.

A few well-publicised convictions will serve as a good deterrent if we can get them.

Time for the city to fight back, but can we please start with Darren ‘Whackhead’ Simpson?

[source: mybroadband]