Police in London today were called to emergencies ranging from burglaries and car accidents to the escape of wild horses onto the street.
The range of 999 calls, from the mundane to the bizarre, were revealed in the Met’s first live Twitter feed of calls to one of its call handling centres.
The event — staged to mark the 75th anniversary of the 999 service — involved releasing details of calls over 12 hours starting from 6am.
Many were routine, such as traffic collisions and domestic assaults. But others included possible serious incidents including reports of “drunken men in Feltham” and a man trapped in a lift.
Police were called to a man in Peckham who was lying in the road and a man causing a disturbance in Brixton job centre.
At 7.41am a 999 call in Hillingdon reported “two wild horses running along the carriageway of the A40”.
Other calls also reported the runaway horses until they were finally rounded up at 9.34am with help from the RSPCA.
Police said they could not tweet all the Met’s 999 and 101 (non-emergency) calls because there were too many.
The 999 emergency call system, the first of its kind in the world, was launched in London on June 30, 1937, following the deaths of five women in a fire at the home of a surgeon in the city in 1935.
Staff began taking 285 calls per day in 1937. Now more than 2,000 staff deal with about 14,000 calls a day. Scotland Yard has changed shift patterns at the Met’s three centres to deal with a surge in demand during the Olympics.
Explaining the rise in calls, Commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe said: “My mum had to walk to the telephone box at the end of the street to get help, and often when she got there it had been vandalised.
Ten per cent of people used to have a landline in their house, now it’s 99 per cent and everybody has a mobile phone. The volume of calls has just gone through the roof.”
Of these, only 20 to 25 per cent turn out to be real emergencies, and there are about 7,000 hoax calls per year.
The busiest days were on August 8 and 9 last year during the riots — with 20,000 calls each day.
