From attempts to book a taxi to complaints about power outages, trivial and nuisance calls made up nearly a quarter of all calls to Northern Territory Police in 2022.
New police statistics reveal that of 379,559 calls received by the NT's emergency call centre last year, 82,323 of them were time wasters.
In one such call, supplied to the ABC, a man can be heard trying to get his driver's licence renewed, to which the police employee answers: "This is triple-0, life and death emergency, not for licence."
It comes as NT Police deal with high levels of crime across the jurisdiction, with property offences, assault and theft all up from the pandemic years, with particularly steep climbs in towns such as Alice Springs and Katherine.
Police Commissioner Jamie Chalker said it had been a busy time at the call centre.
"We've got great public support in that people are choosing to pick up the phone and report [crime]," he said.
"That's seen [us receive] in excess of 100 calls for an incident.
"Notably we do still have issues at the moment with people who misuse our service.
"We just simply ask, don't make those vexatious calls. Appreciate that we are busy and what we're ultimately here to do is to serve and protect the Northern Territory."
Commissioner Chalker this week announced the call centre was receiving a staffing boost, with 13 new police graduates hired to respond to emergency calls from across the territory.
NT Police Association acting president Owen Blackwell said the high amount of nuisance calls could be putting lives at risk.
"There's only a finite number of call takers, and if they're on a phone call with a frivolous complaint, then they're not taking a serious one," Mr Blackwell said.
"And that person may be in serious strife, and 30 to 40 seconds is a long time when you're in trouble."
Alice Springs emergency call volume 'significant'
Commissioner Chalker also said a "significant" amount of legitimate emergency calls were coming from Alice Springs, which is struggling with a prolonged and frequently violent crime crisis.
"We certainly know it's a significant number [of calls from Alice Springs] as a ratio compared to other parts of the Northern Territory," Commissioner Chalker said.
"That's not necessarily surprising given that Alice Springs is such a huge service hub for a whole part [of Central Australia]."
Despite the huge volume of calls coming from Central Australia, Commissioner Chalker defended having all of the NT's emergency call centre operators based in Darwin.
"Having our bush coppers have to answer the phones in their police stations, they would never get any respite," he said.
"It is literally a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week type of operation."
NT Police data from the beginning of 2023 showed about 65 per cent of calls to triple-0 were answered within 10 seconds, and about 78 per cent of calls to 131 444 in the same time frame.
The statistics for police response times for the whole of 2022 were unavailable.
