The Leader went behind the scenes at North Wales Police to join call handlers at the Joint Command Centre in St Asaph.
Inspector Alun Davies, a force incident manager, is responsible for the dozens of call handlers working for North Wales Police who answer the hundreds of 999 calls that come in every single day, from across the region.
You have no idea what will be on the other end of the line, he explained, from panicked members of the public dialling the emergency line, to calls where the person on the other end is too afraid to speak and responds by button pressing.
In the brief time we spoke, reports of collisions, thefts, assaults and disorderly behaviour came through from the public.
In our jobs as journalists, crime is a regular occurrence that we report on often. Looking out over the control room floor, it was evident that these men and women were able to keep a level head and respond with urgency whilst under intense pressure.
From reports of bad parking and dead-end calls, we spoke about the volume of hoax calls taken by call handlers.
Out of the thousands of calls that can be taken during a single shift on average, hoax calls and people wrongly using the service thankfully take up a minimal amount of time.
Figures obtained by the Leader through a Freedom of Information request shows that, in the past three years, the number of hoax calls identified across the region has steadily declined.
In 2016, the force took a staggering 77,108 emergency calls across all areas of North Wales, with almost 60 of these being identified as hoaxes.
In comparison, the most recent figures for 2018 show that the police received more than 91,000 emergency calls to report various crimes from across North Wales. Just 27 of these were wasting police time and swiftly terminated - which shows the number has more than halved in two years.
Insp Davies said the handlers see more abandoned calls than hoaxes, which could present themselves for a number of reasons.
The force has relaunched an ongoing campaign called 'Don't Tie Up The Line' - which aims to get members of the public to think before they dial, and if they need to dial at all, which would lessen the amount of unnecessary calls.
The force incident manager explained that the North Wales Police team is also urging more people to report crimes online through the facilities available via the force's webpage.
North Wales Police's website has a number of options and Insp Davies explained how, when reporting a crime, an individual will be signposted to the next relevant stage of making a report - whether that is continuing with the online form or picking up the phone to dial the relevant line.
The sections are broken down into common categories of crime reports and, where the matter is not within the remit of North Wales Police's powers, they will signpost accordingly to councils, mental health services and helplines.
The force also operate a live web chat service which will always have one dedicated handler monitoring and Insp Davies said this service can help minimise the volume of calls coming in and keep enough operators on hand to respond when emergencies arise.
The online service is available at https://www.north-wales.police.uk/contact/minor-incident-reporting.
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