Police Hotline Down in Southern Russia

Police in Russia’s southern Krasnodar region admitted on Tuesday that it failed to respond to the rising demand for its services because its telephone hotline went defunct due to the influx of calls.

The mishap was first reported on Monday by local prosecutors, who said residents started calling them to complain they could not get through to the police on its federal hotline number “02.”

The situation was due to the number of callers rising from an average 600 to some 1,000 a day since early May, Krasnodar police said on their website.

Police did not specify what caused the increase, but said it has overloaded most of the hotline’s five lines, causing them to freeze and crash.

The number of lines will be increased to 10 by the week’s end, and residents are also advised to report law violations via regular telephones of local police departments or by email, the report said.

Officials responsible for the failure will face administrative warnings but no one will be fired, police said, without elaborating.

Krasnodar region made national headlines after a family of 12, including underage children, was butchered in its Kushchevskaya village in 2010.

The investigation blamed the mass murder on a local gang that terrorized the village for years in cahoots with local officials, some of whom were alleged gang members. Some security experts said at the time the situation was typical for Krasnodar, as well as many other Russian regions.

 

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