The Ghana Police Service says they received 750,500 prank calls at their Police Emergency Command Centres (PECCs) between January 1, 2019, and midday of March 27, 2019.
According to three PEECs in Accra, Kumasi and Tamale, out of the 761,101 calls made them,751,217 were prank calls, while only 9,884 were genuine calls.
A prank call is a mischievous telephone call made to trick someone and is often a nuisance call done to irritate the person answering the call.
According to officers in charge of the PECC in Accra, some people called to insult the people on duty, some to demand mobile phone credit, others to make fun of the police, while others claimed it was their children who dialled the numbers without their knowledge.
The Inspector-General of Police (IGP), Mr David Asante-Apeatu, says the prank calls often impeded access to persons who might genuinely need the services of the police.
The IGP explained that because the system was digitised and a case ticket generated for each call if a person called as many times as possible, the technology was such that it could make reference to all the calls he or she had made to the centre.
He said if all the calls of such an individual were found to be a prank, that number would be blacklisted from one hour to a maximum of 24 hours and then removed from the blacklist.
During the period of the blacklist, he said, that number could not make any calls into the system again.
He, however, explained that because the police were not sure when such a person might be in genuine need, the period of blacklisting was very short.
He, therefore, asked those behind this act to desist from it.
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