Only 60 per cent of 999 emergency calls to Hong Kong police are genuine
Force warns lives may be at risk as operators deal with nuisance or misdialling callers
The 999 police emergency hotline was jammed by over 446,000 nuisance or misdialled calls in the first half of the year.
The force asked the public not to abuse the service and urged those with less pressing matters to contact local police stations.
In the first six months, police regional command and control centres received 1,114,819 calls, of which about 60 per cent, or 668,668, were genuine.
The remaining 446,151 were nuisance calls or misdialled. This means that operators at the police centres handled an average of 1.7 such calls every minute.
It was, however, a slight improvement on the 503,249 nuisance calls - about 44 per cent of all 999 calls - recorded during the same period last year.
A police spokesman said: "Misuse of the emergency hotline will unnecessarily engage operators of the control centres and delay the handling of genuine emergencies.