Police in north east Scotland did not attend almost 600 emergency calls
Almost 600 calls to emergency services were not attended by police in the North East in the last year, according to a report.
STV announced on its website that Police in the region did not send an officer to 583 calls to 999 from April 2014 to March this year.
The figures, released to the Press and Journal after a Freedom of Information (FOI) request, cover Aberdeenshire, Moray and Aberdeen division between April 2014 and March this year.
The newspaper said emergency calls involving reports of disorder, road traffic collisions and animal cruelty were not deemed serious enough to attend.
Police Scotland say the figures relate to less than 2 per cent of their overall calls last year and say some of the cases were due to a caller dialling 999 in a non-emergency.
In a statement, the force said: "Police Scotland respond to all 999 calls in a highly effective manner, answering over 90% of those calls in less than 10 seconds.
"We have a strict criterion for categorising and prioritising those subsequent incidents which are subject to further assessment in terms of the severity and urgency of the response required by highly trained Control room staff.
"Only 1.9% of the 30,495 calls we received from April 1, 2014 to March 31, 2015 did not result in an officer attending and there are several reasons for this.
"A number of those calls were malicious calls, whilst others due to the caller dialling 999 for a non-emergency matter or in fact a matter which does not concern the police.
"In the latter cases officers may be deployed at the caller's convenience due to the non criticality of the incident at a later date to deal with the matter. To suggest that officers have failed to respond to an emergency situation is simply not the case.
