Police slam time-waster for dialling 999 about a wasp in her house

Police have criticised a time-waster who dialled 999 her house had been invaded - by a wasp.

Nottinghamshire Police used the incident to remind people not to misuse 999 with trivial calls which would prevent them from dealing with serious emergencies.

The force said that the unnamed caller, from Nottingham, told the specially-trained emergency operator: "A wasp is in my house and I don’t know how to get it outside.”

Nottinghamshire Police said it receives thousands of calls each month and while most are genuine emergencies, there are still “a number of spurious and misplaced calls”.

Superintendent Paul Burrows, from Nottinghamshire Police’s Contact Management department, said: “The vast majority of the public understand that 999 is only for emergency calls.

"Despite the work we regularly do in the media, online and over-the-phone to explain to people how to use 999 responsibly, we do still receive a high number of misplaced calls to our emergency number.

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“While some of the misplaced calls we receive range from honest errors of judgement to the more unusual, there is a serious point to be made here as every misplaced call our emergency call handlers receive has the potential to delay us from responding to genuine emergencies.”