Increase in prank calls worrying

People do encounter emergencies or life-threatening situations every day which require immediate assistance or rescue from such circumstances.

It is why toll-free lines have been made available for easy access to emergency services, such as the National Ambulance Service (NAS), the Ghana National Fire Service (GNFS) and the Ghana Police Service (GPS).

Unfortunately, the numbers, which must be cherished because they are lifelines that can be depended on when anyone finds himself or herself in a dire situation, are being toyed with.

Prank calls have become a rising and disturbing phenomenon in the performance of emergency services and the sooner we act to nip it in the bud, the better it will be for us as a nation.

The Daily Graphic finds it very troubling that prank calls, instead of being the exception, have become the norm.

The statistics tell it all. For instance, the NAS reported that in 2021 alone, 80 per cent of all the calls it received were hoax.

From December 24, 2018 to January 2, 2019 alone, the GNFS had to deal with over 297,000 prank calls, while, on the average, the service received such calls from 4,000 different phone numbers and 29,700 different calls on a daily basis within the period, the Assistant Fire Master at the Fire Service Control Room, Divisional Officer Grade II (DOII), Mrs Joyce Ghansah, told the Daily Graphic in an interview.

The Daily Graphic reporter who conducted the interview witnessed 30 prank calls within 10 minutes of arriving at the Master Control Room.

As a matter of fact, the police are not spared the nuisance calls. The three Police Emergency Command centres in Accra, Kumasi and Tamale recorded 751,217 prank calls between midnight on January 1 and midday, March 27, 2019.

Most of the calls were made to insult the persons on duty, demand mobile phone credit, make fun of the police and raise false alarm, with others claiming it was their children who dialed the numbers without their knowledge.

We acknowledge the fact that while dialing phone numbers, one may end up dialling a wrong number, in which case the caller would only have to apologise and hang up.

However, the sheer frequency of prank calls to the three emergency services suggests that they are intentional and calculated to make fun of personnel of those services.

The 112 toll free line and the 191, 192 and 193 for the police, the GNFS and the NAS, respectively, are not meant for jokes – emergencies are no joking business.

Apart from affecting timely access to critical emergency assistance by blocking those in need of such services, prank calls are diversionary and a waste of scarce resources, especially when they send service providers on a wild goose chase.

Also, when prank callers are blocked, it may deny a caller access if a real and important emergency occurs in the future.

It is a shame that some of the prank calls are made by children, which suggest the lack of proper parental supervision, especially in this era of mobile phones which belong to adults and parents. Parents must be a bit more responsible.

As explained by Mrs Ghansah, due to the pranks, sometimes fire officers had delayed in arriving at scenes of fire, incurring public disaffection because officers have had to conduct investigations to ascertain whether, indeed, a property is on fire or an area needs emergency help.

We recommend the arrest and prosecution of prank callers to serve as a deterrent to others and also free the emergency services to deliver on their mandate.

We, therefore, believe that the collaboration of the GNFS with National Security to track persons who engage in such activities is in the right direction.

The Daily Graphic also sees the installation of fire detection cameras in some parts of Accra to help the GNFS monitor fire outbreaks as a positive move, but urges that all buildings, commercial and private, must have devices to track emergencies, as done in other jurisdictions.

We urge all the three emergency services to liaise with the telecom companies to track prank callers in order to bring them to book.

If we are able to do that successfully, prank calls will become a thing of the past.