By EMS1 Staff
NEW YORK — New York’s 911 system gets nearly 4 million calls a year from people who accidentally dial on cell phones, according to a new report. .
Most of the calls, known as butt calls or pocket dials, came from cell phone users who unknowingly dial 911 when accidentally touching their phones stored in their back pockets, purses or elsewhere.
In 2010, the system handled 3,910,373 pocket dials, which outnumbered actual dispatches, according to The NY Daily News. In the first four months of 2011 (the most recent information available in the report), the calls increased to 39 percent of all calls handled by police operators.
According to the report, “The NYPD reported the 2010 System Average Total Talk Time was 1:08 minutes. Since the total number of calls received includes approximately 3.9 million short calls, utilizing this metric as currently calculated does not accurately reflect the NYPD’s time spent on received and processed 9-1-1 calls.”
In 2003, only 29 percent of all calls to 911 came from cell phones, but that percentage has increased to 59 and is expected to keep growing.
The city has done nothing to reduce the butt calls despite an urging from the Virginia-based Winbourne Consulting Group (which authored the report) to launch “a public awareness” campaign to reduce accidental calls and “significantly decrease the work load on the 911 system,” thus increasing “average speed of answer.”
The statistics are outlined in a report into the operations at a new $680 million call center, with consultants finding the system is plagued by delays and errors.
Mayor Bloomberg admitted Tuesday that he had not “bothered” to read the report that he himself had commissioned after the botched response to the Christmas blizzard of 2010.