Police control room flooded with phone calls providing false information and making frivolous enquiries

A spate of blank calls, crank calls and enquiries to their control room has put the city police in a state of bother. People are intentionally providing false information, many a times, to settle personal scores, the police said.u00a0Recently, a person called the control room claiming that a suspected terrorist was roaming about in a particular area.


False alarm: Police say even children were calling up at the police
control room without their parents' knowledge. Representation pic

When the Pune Anti Terrorism Cell (PATC) cross checked this information, it was only to find out that the person named Bhikaji Makaji Kadam of 62, Nashik Road, had shared the information to settle a personal score with a man.

Kadam was arrested for criminal intimidation through anonymous communication and sharing wrong information with the police. Besides Kadam, the police have arrested and booked two more such callers for purposely sharing wrong information with the police.

Child's play
The police said that many small children were calling up control rooms without their parent's knowledge.
The police have issued notices under Criminal Procedures section 149 in 229 such hoax cases.u00a0 "Almost 70 to 80 per cent of the calls are blank calls or calls with some nuisance value.

Only 1.5 per cent of the calls are helpful and some 15 per cent of outstation calls are those making enquiries," said Rajendra Patil, Assistant Commissioner of Police, in charge of the Pune police control room. "In the last one month, we have summoned some 108 such people to the commissioner's office and have given them a written warning against repeating such incidents." Last month, a software engineer was arrested in Hadapsar for making a bomb hoax call just for fun.

The '100' room
The computerised control room of the city police was inaugurated on November 22, 2009. It has 10 dedicated lines for all calls made to the toll-free number 100. About 10 constables are posted at any given time in the control room to receive these calls.