Janiel McEwan | The line that cannot afford to wait: How Jamaica is letting its emergency system drown

There is a moment – familiar to every emergency call handler, on every shift, in every country on earth – when the phone rings and the world holds its breath. The operator picks up. What comes through the line in the next three seconds will determine what happens next. A child not breathing. A man with a gun at the door. Smoke filling a kitchen. A car overturned on a curve in the dark.

In Jamaica, that moment happens thousands of times a day.

The Police Emergency Communication Centre (PECC) receives an estimated 5,000 to 9,000 calls every single day on its 119 emergency line. Somewhere in that queue is a cardiac arrest, a domestic violence situation spiralling beyond return, a road accident where the next five minutes are the difference between life and paralysis. 

And somewhere ahead of it in the queue – ahead, and behind, and surrounding it on all sides – are the calls that were never emergencies at all.

According to Assistant Commissioner of Police Gary Francis, head of the PECC, only about 20 per cent of calls received daily through the emergency system are genuinely emergency-related. The rest? Fifteen per cent are police-related, but non-emergencies; and 65 per cent are classified as prank or nuisance calls.

Read that again: out of every 100 calls that reach Jamaica's most critical national lifeline, 20 are real. Sixty-five are not.

This is not a new problem. It is not even a recent one. What it is, undeniably, is a national failure – one that has been documented, lamented, warned about, promised away, and then quietly allowed to continue for the better part of a decade and a half. And every day it continues, people with real emergencies wait longer. Some of them do not survive the wait.

THE MACHINERY OF CRISIS; AND WHAT BREAKS IT

To understand what prank calls do to an emergency system, you have to understand what an emergency system actually is. It is not merely a phone number. It is a chain – call handler, dispatcher, patrol unit, ambulance, fire crew – and that chain operates on one foundational assumption: that the calls coming in reflect real and urgent need.

Compromise that assumption, and you do not simply slow the system. You corrupt it.

Emergency operators cannot hang up on ambiguous calls. They cannot assume that a silent line is a butt-dial rather than a victim too terrified to speak. They cannot treat a child laughing on the other end as harmless and move on without a second thought, because sometimes people do laugh when they are scared, and sometimes children call in panic because they have no other language for it. Every incoming call must be assessed. That assessment takes time. Time that belongs, in some fractional but real sense, to whoever is waiting behind it.

As Francis himself put it: "We have a queuing system, so it is the first call that is sent that will be answered. Somewhere down that queue may be a very serious life-threatening call that we lose, because we didn't get to it."

That is not a hypothetical. Deputy Commissioner of Police Dr. Kevin Blake has stated plainly that persons have lost their lives because the police could not get to them in time due to the volume of prank calls. He is not speaking in the language of possibility. He is speaking in the language of documented fact.

Consider what a delayed emergency response actually means in a country like Jamaica. An ambulance that arrives seven minutes late to a cardiac arrest, rather than three, confronts survival odds that have already collapsed. A domestic violence call that sits in queue behind 40 prank calls may never be answered before the violence is over. A fire unit dispatched to a false alarm and then immediately recalled to a real structure fire loses critical minutes of water pressure and positioning. These are not abstractions. They are the operational arithmetic of a system under siege.

A NUMBER THAT HAS NOT MOVED IN TEN YEARS

What makes this crisis so particularly damning is not its severity alone. It is its persistence.

As far back as 2016, then-National Security Minister Robert Montague disclosed that out of 32,000 daily calls to 119, some 22,000 were made by persons intent on creating mischief. He promised that technology to trace and punish offenders was on its way. The equipment was coming. The software was being delivered. Action was imminent.

Seven years later, the numbers were worse. By 2023, the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) was reporting that on some days, more than 7,600 calls – representing 85 per cent of total volume – were prank calls. The government announced, again, that legislation was being drafted to address the problem.

By 2024, the JCF's own Call Centre Manager, Tania Ricketts, was describing how the police receive at least five prank calls within a single minute. "We have those calls every minute, every shift, every day, it's just constant," she said.

And in 2025, the figure stood at 65 per cent – still, after all of it, catastrophically high.

The pattern here is not of a problem being slowly addressed. It is of a problem being perpetually discovered, publicly mourned, and then structurally abandoned. The legislation that was promised in 2023 has not been enacted. Existing frameworks remain incomplete: there are currently no laws making the direct abuse of the 119 emergency system itself a prosecutable offence, with authorities left to consider peripheral statutes such as the Nuisance Act to pursue misuse cases. 

A nation that has watched this happen for a decade and more has not yet found the collective will to write the law that would stop it.

WHEN CHILDREN ARE BOTH THE PROBLEM AND THE VICTIM

The demographics of the crisis carry their own particular sting.

Most of the calls placed to the 119 emergency line are prank calls from children. With more than 10,000 calls received daily, the figure for prank calls stood at 68 per cent for one measured period, with Superintendent Talbert Whyte appealing specifically to parents to "control and educate their children".

The prank calls typically peak in the summer period while children are on holidays – a finding consistent across multiple years of JCF reporting. School breaks flood the system. The phone lines fill with giggles and silence and disconnected tones.

But those same children are also the population most at risk when the system they are overwhelming fails to reach someone who needs it. A child calling 119 for a laugh sits, demographically, very close to a child calling 119 in genuine distress – a domestic incident, a car crash, an assault near a school gate. The cruelty of the situation is that the first category makes it harder to serve the second.

The more troubling development is that some of the misuse has grown darker than childish pranks.

Between January and February 2026, three minors were arrested and charged with use of computers for malicious communication and creating public mischief following a series of bomb threats to schools that resulted in the disruption of academic activities and the immediate evacuation of affected schools. Each incident required significant deployment of police personnel, members of the Jamaica Fire Brigade, and other resources.

In a related wave of school bomb threats beginning in late 2023, the Education Minister disclosed that 74 schools had been affected in a matter of days, with the Education Ministry subsequently having to formulate trauma response strategies in collaboration with the health ministry and guidance counselling units. The threats were hoaxes. But the disruption they caused – to children, parents, teachers, and the security forces scrambled across multiple parishes – was entirely real.

There is a direct line between a child who learns that calling 119 with a joke carries no consequence and an older child who learns that sending a bomb threat causes satisfying chaos with equal impunity. The culture of disregard does not stay small.

THE FIRE BRIGADE: A PARALLEL CRISIS, SAME ROOT

The scale of misuse is not limited to the police emergency line. The Jamaica Fire Brigade (JFB) tells the same story with different numbers.

The Brigade received 1,759 malicious false alarms in 2024, a 24.4 per cent increase compared to the 1,413 received in 2023. As JFB Public Education Officer Superintendent Emeleo Ebanks has noted, false alarms from children tend to increase during the holiday season, and the problem is not unique to fire services.

The cost of a false alarm to the fire brigade is not merely the wasted hour. As Ebanks outlined: "A fire truck coming down the road in itself is dangerous. This is a truck that is operating under emergency conditions. Every time that truck drives out under emergency conditions, you are endangering the lives of the firefighters and you're endangering the lives of other road users."

JFB Commissioner Stewart Beckford has confirmed that a project is now being worked on to identify where prank calls originate, with a central number that can identify callers' locations – a system that would also benefit genuine emergencies where a caller gets disconnected. This is progress, but it has taken years of documented, escalating harm to bring it to even the development stage.

The financial toll accumulates invisibly. Each unnecessary deployment burns fuel, wears equipment, occupies personnel who might otherwise be responding to the next alarm that comes in while they are still resetting. In a brigade operating on constrained budgets, with finite equipment and finite staff, those costs are not absorbed, they are deducted from readiness.

THE COMPARATIVE CONTEXT: WHY JAMAICA IS DIFFERENT

Emergency systems across the world struggle with misuse. In Europe, the pan-continental 112 system handles enormous volumes of non-emergency and accidental contact. In the United States, the 911 network – which processes hundreds of millions of calls per year – faces persistent challenges with abuse, pocket-dials, and deliberate hoaxes. The United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia all run regular public education campaigns alongside enforcement regimes because they know that without both, neither works alone.

But the comparison illuminates something important about Jamaica's specific vulnerability.

Large, well-resourced emergency systems can absorb inefficiency. When a 911 centre in Los Angeles handles a flood of false calls, it still has enormous infrastructure depth: multiple overlapping dispatch systems, redundant coverage, layers of personnel. The margin for error is wide enough that misuse, while costly, does not routinely mean that real emergencies go unanswered.

Jamaica operates without that margin. The system does not have surplus ambulances parked in reserve. It does not have battalion-strength police units that can absorb endless unnecessary deployments without consequence. Of the 27,000 calls logged daily to 119, authorities have acknowledged they are only able to deal with roughly 45 to 46 per cent, able to accept only around 11,000. The rest simply do not get through.

In that context, the 65 per cent prank call rate is not an inconvenience. It is a structural crisis. Each wasted call is not absorbed by redundancy, it displaces something real.

THE PEOPLE ANSWERING THE PHONES

In the public conversation about 119 misuse, one dimension rarely receives adequate attention: what it costs the people who do this work.

ACP Francis has explained that the figures highlighting how few calls are genuine emergencies underscore the importance of continuous training for call handlers, who must remain professional and composed despite dealing with a high volume of prank calls.

That word – composed – carries weight that is easy to underestimate.

Emergency call handlers operate in a state of continuous alertness. Every call could be the one that matters most. To maintain that alertness across a shift in which the vast majority of calls are pranks, abuse, silence, and noise requires a form of sustained discipline that is psychologically exhausting. 

Studies on emergency dispatcher burnout, predominantly conducted in the United States and Europe, consistently identify volume of irrelevant contact as a key stressor, one that degrades attentiveness over time even in the most experienced operators.

Jamaica has not invested significantly in public acknowledgement of this dimension of the crisis. The people answering the phones are doing extraordinary work under conditions that would erode the focus of virtually anyone. They deserve legislation, infrastructure, and public culture that support them – not a national conversation that treats their working conditions as a regrettable background fact.

WHAT MUST ACTUALLY CHANGE

The solutions to this problem are not obscure. They have been named by the JCF, the JFB, elected officials, and public commentators for years. What has been missing is not knowledge – it is the sustained political and civic will to implement.

Legislation with real teeth remains the most urgent need. The current absence of a specific law making 119 misuse a prosecutable offence leaves authorities relying on tangential statutes that were never designed for this purpose. 

A dedicated law – one that clearly defines the offence, specifies proportionate penalties, and includes provisions for cost recovery from repeat offenders – would transform the calculus for at least a segment of those who currently make prank calls with no expectation of consequence. The government announced it was drafting such legislation in 2023. It is now 2026. The drafting must become enactment.

Technology investment must accompany legal reform. The JFB's development of a centralised caller identification system points toward the kind of infrastructure that should have been in place years ago. Caller tracing, location identification, and structured triage tools do not eliminate the problem, but they change the nature of it – misuse becomes traceable, and traceability changes behaviour. 

A system in which prank callers can be identified and held accountable is one they are less likely to abuse.

A dedicated non-emergency line is essential. A significant portion of the calls that clog 119 are not malicious, they are misdirected. People with legitimate but non-urgent inquiries call 119 because they do not know what else to call. Creating a well-publicised, accessible alternative channel for non-emergency contact would reduce the load on 119 without denying anyone access to help.

Public education must become genuinely structural, not episodic. The current approach – periodic appeals from senior police officers, occasional media statements, annual warnings to parents at the start of school holidays – has demonstrably not worked. What is needed is education embedded in school curricula, in driver's education, in community institutions, in digital spaces where young Jamaicans actually spend their time. Not a campaign, but a transformation of civic understanding about what 119 is, why it matters, and what the consequences of misuse look like in human terms.

And then there is the cultural dimension, which is harder to legislate and harder to measure but ultimately the most important of all. Emergency systems function on a form of collective compact: we agree not to waste the resource that might, one day, be the thing standing between us and catastrophe. That compact requires not just individual restraint, but social pressure, a community norm in which prank-calling 119 is understood as not merely illegal but genuinely shameful. 

The norm does not currently exist at the required scale. Building it is the work of educators, parents, media, community leaders, and political voices, not any one institution alone.

THE COST OF WHAT WE HAVE ALLOWED

There is no precise count of the lives lost to this problem. Emergency systems do not produce a ledger marked "death by delayed response due to prank call volume". The connection is diffuse, distributed across years of accumulated harm – a slightly slower dispatch here, an operator too depleted to catch the urgency in a muffled voice there.

But the diffuseness does not mean the harm is absent. It means it is invisible. And things that are invisible are easier to accept.

The people who call 119 as a joke – the children daring each other, the adults testing the line, the individuals who experience a momentary whim and act on it without consequence – do not see what happens three calls down the queue. They do not see the operator's face when a real call finally breaks through the noise, urgent and late. They do not stand beside the family waiting in a hospital corridor because the ambulance was tied up verifying a false alarm across town.

They do not see it. But it is there.

As Dr. Blake said: "The word emergency means something to the JCF. It means someone is in need of help, and you might think it is fun, as you don't see the harm in the end, but persons have lost their lives because we could not get to them in time, because of prank calls."

119 is not broken. The operators sitting at those screens and headsets, maintaining composure through shift after shift, doing their jobs with professionalism that the data reveals is genuinely heroic – they are not failing. The infrastructure, for all it needs modernising, is not the problem.

The problem is what we have collectively decided to do with it.

Somewhere in Jamaica right now, a phone is ringing at the PECC. Whether the person on the other end gets through in time depends, in some small but real measure, on the 65 calls that came before it that should never have been made.

That is the weight of this problem. Not abstract. Not statistical.

Just a phone ringing, and the whole country in the balance of what comes next.

- Janiel McEwan is an economist. Email feedback to [email protected] and [email protected]. ONLINE ONLY COMMENTARY.