South Yorkshire: Drunken New Year’s Eve callers dial 999 to ask for lifts home, bus times, and claiming to be Shameless’ Frank Gallagher

Figures released show that, on the busiest night of the year, police were inundated with nuisance calls to 999.

One caller rang from Doncaster bus station to ask call handlers if they could help him get back to Pontefract as there were no more buses running.

Another rang to ask police to drive him from Crookesmoor, Sheffield, to his home address around a mile away in Walkley, to see in the New Year with his family.

A woman described as “hysterical” rang 999 after a taxi driver asked her to pay her fare up front, while another caller rang with the noise of a loud house party in the background, claiming he was Frank Gallagher from the television drama “Shameless.”

Shortly before 3am on New Year’s Day, a man called police to ask if officers could drive his drunken girlfriend back home to Derby, and another caller rang to say he’d lost his house keys.

There were also false reports of crime, which took up valuable police.

One 18-year-old man rang 999 saying that a car had driven at him, knocked him over and driven off at speed. Police graded the call as an “immediate response”, the highest level of priority, but found the teenager with no injuries. He had apparently made the story up.

Another man claimed he had been assaulted, although he had actually fallen down the stairs.

Tracy Potter, operations manager at South Yorkshire Police, said: “As a Force we had planned resources in advance in order to manage the high number of calls and incidents, which were expected.”

“Prior to midnight the number of incidents were relatively low, with there being the expected number of revellers in the town centres, but in good spirits.”

“But there were 572 calls to 999 between midnight and 5am, generating a total of 737 incidents. Of these, 219 were immediate and 123 were priorities for police officers to attend.”

“The majority of incidents related, as expected, to alcohol-fuelled incidences of fighting and domestic incidents.”

“Overall, it was a busy start to the New Year, with all South Yorkshire Police personnel striving to maintain a high level of service to the public.”

“What we could have done without were the nuisance and hoax calls made by people who obviously had nothing better to do on New Year’s Eve than waste police time and, potentially, prevent us from getting to a serious incident as quickly.”

Total calls made to South Yorkshire Police over the New Year period were up by around eight per cent from 2012.

Between 6am on 31st December 2013 and 6am on 1st January 2014 there were 1,849 calls made to the Force.

These figures compare to 1,710 such calls made to South Yorkshire Police over the equivalent 24-hour period the previous year.

On an average day the Force would expect to receive between 1,100 and 1,200 calls.