Suffolk Police defend unanswered calls

Available for over a year

More than a hundred callers a day are giving up trying to ring Suffolk Police's non emergency number, BBC Radio Suffolk has found. Figures released to the Stephen Foster programme under a Freedom of Information request show that the force received a total of more than 165,000 calls to 101 in a year. But more than 44,000 went unanswered. The report also showed that the average time for the force to answer a 101 call was more than five minutes. Ch Insp Matt Rose told Stephen Foster that just because people abandoned their calls, it does not necessarily mean they could not get through.