Prank calls, technical glitches and rude or unresponsive police officers are some of the reasons Grahamstown residents can't get help in a hurry when they call the police. Matthew Smith Miller reports.
Prank calls, technical glitches and rude or unresponsive police officers are some of the reasons Grahamstown residents can't get help in a hurry when they call the police. Matthew Smith Miller reports.
Grahamstown's police commander expressed outrage when he heard a resident's account of being fobbed off by the police three times after someone was assaulted outside her house, but cited prank calls and technical glitches as being the main reasons for delays in police response.
In a recent meeting of the Community Policing Forum (CPF), Lee Anne Fobe, a CPF Member from Sector 1, reported that she had dialled 112 (an emergency number for cellphones) after a group of men carried out an assault in the vicinity of her house – but no one had answered.
She subsequently called the cellphone number of the SAPS sector policing van assigned to her area – but the officer who answered allegedly told her, "I'm not the police station." He told her to call 10111, saying, "This is none of my business."
Fobe had thrown down the phone in frustration, she said.
Brigadier Morgan Govender, the SAPS Station Commander for Grahamstown, was present at the meeting and expressed outrage upon hearing Fobe's story. Every van shift was briefed that they must answer the cellphones, Govender said.
Govender insisted that the radio room is sufficiently staffed, but prank calls interfered with SAPS services. CPF Chairperson Glenda Duffy, who volunteered in the radio room one evening earlier in the month, confirmed this was a problem, saying she had answered "quite a few" prank calls, mostly from youths. One caller just said, "I love you!" and then hung up. The police cannot currently trace these calls, leaving them powerless to catch the pranksters.
These problems were compounded by apparently serious technical glitches that had intermittently haunted the 10111 line for two years or more. Govender told those attending the Rapid Urban Response launch last month that many residents had reported difficulties reaching the radio room when dialling 10111.
The call seemed to get lost, Govender said, and the phones in the radio room might not even ring.
"You can't ask me to explain that, because Telkom cannot explain to me," Govender said. "For the last two years we're trying to rectify the situation and we cannot."
Cellphone callers might face a different problem, in which their 10111 calls were redirected to police stations in other cities (the technical term is for this error is "translation").
SAPS spokesperson Captain Mali Govender confirmed this problem, and said she had experienced it first-hand. Calling 10111 from within Grahamstown once, she was answered by a Cape Town radio room.
She had called again and found herself speaking to people in Bloemfontein.
The problem was not confined to a particular network, she said.
Mali Govender confirmed that a misconduct file had been opened regarding the officer who allegedly refused to respond to an emergency call and that the matter was under investigation.
A spokesperson for Telkom declined to comment on the question of technical problems, but said he would look into the issue.
The same Telkom spokesperson said any problem with cellphone calls must be brought up with specific cellphone companies.
