Durban - Thousands of 10111 emergency calls have not been logged or recorded for the past six months at the Durban 10111 call centre because equipment has been out of order.
The logging and recording of emergency calls is not only necessary for quality control but could offer vital clues when investigating crimes.
The Durban emergency call centre has come under fire for ignoring what they believed were hoax calls – but which were real cries for help – after a South Coast woman was ignored by police. She called 10111 and was hung-up on before several armed men stormed her home and threatened to kill her daughters.
Last month, while a Mount Edgecombe restaurant was being robbed by a gang of armed men, a waiter made a call to 10111. The operator purportedly instructed him to call the local police station and ended the call.
A well-placed police source, who could not be named, said renovations to the Durban central police station, where the emergency centre is based, had hampered the recording of calls made to 10111.
“We have been told that because the building is being refurbished the recording is no longer being done. It has been this way for months now.
“If you made a call to 10111 and the call-taker was incompetent and you wanted a record of the conversation, it is not available. We were once able to pull up a recording of every call made to this centre, but that time is long over,” he said.
DA spokeswoman on police Dianne Kohler Barnard said all calls should be recorded.
“The calls should be recorded, logged and handed to the relevant police station. I believe that if any independent entity were to listen to the recordings that centre would be shut down.
“I have on two occasions been greeted with a grunt, and unfortunately one is frequently hung-up on.”
Kohler Barnard said staff representing the police should be equipped with the best training. “It is not acceptable that staff taking these calls are not subject to the best training, as is done at virtually every call centre in the country.”
Institute for Security Studies spokesman Johan Burger said emergency calls may be used in court and their absence pointed to incompetence of police management.
“Of course they have to have contingency plans in place, including an alternative mechanism for the recording of calls. I also cannot see why, when called for, such information could not be used in court.
“The fact this information may not be available when so required would arguably be seen as incompetence on the part of the police and could be a deciding factor in cases where it was needed,” he said.
He said the inability of police to ensure that internal oversight mechanisms were put in place spoke to the weakness of the police force.
“This is part of the systemic factors at the root of most of the problems currently being experienced by the police that causes high levels of criminality and corruption, brutality and poor service delivery.”
Public Service Accountability Monitor head Paul Hoffman said cadre deployment was the root of the issue.
“We have seen it time and time again where cadre deployment to positions of top management has provided a decay of essential services, and in this case in a system that should promote openness and accountability,” he said.
He said if emergency calls could not be monitored, police could not adequately be held accountable by the people they were employed to serve.
Police spokesman Colonel Vincent Mdunge disputed the length of time recording equipment had been out of order.
“The commanders of the 10111 centre assure us the equipment has not been working for three months and not six. This equipment does not hamper the taking of emergency calls and the dispatching of police,” he said.
He added that police had no contingency plan in place and blamed the fault on construction at the police station.
He would not comment on when the system would be up and running.
Sunday Tribune