These are the worst time-wasting calls the Met Police has received this year

A man from London who dialled 999 because KFC had run out of chicken has been called out by the Met Police as a time-waster.

Scotland Yard has released the genuine audio tape of the call along with six others, including a complaint about a whistling bus driver.

One person even called the police to wish them a “Happy New Year”, while another moaned about how long it took their pub breakfast to be served.

Describing the incident on the emergency line, the KFC customer said:

Basically, KFC have run out of chicken.

Laughter can be heard in the background, before the call handler said:

We can see where you’re calling from.

The man then hangs up.

Over the last year, Met Police call handlers took more than two million 999 calls, but more than 20,000 of these were unnecessary.

By releasing the tapes of some of these calls, the Met hope to highlight the amount of time-wasting 999 operators have to deal with.

Chief superintendent David Jackson, who is in charge of call handling for the Met, said:

While some people will find these calls funny, they take away police resources at a time that police numbers and funding are stretched, and we must continue to make savings across the service.

During the time that our call handlers are dealing with these time-wasting calls, a member of the public could be in real danger or have built up the confidence to call with an important piece of information that could take a dangerous person off the streets.

Imagine if one of your friends or loved ones was in need of the police as quickly as possible and it turned out we could not help because we were having to deal with one of these hoax calls – I’m sure that you, like us, would be devastated and extremely annoyed.

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