Secondary Emergency

Two student nurses were threatened with rape by male intruders. They called police but it took four hours for them to respond, by which point the men had long since fled. The men told them,

'We are going to remember your faces and names, and next time, we are going to rape you'.

The police claimed that because the young women were behind a locked door, their case was prioritised as a "secondary emergency".

Their excuse? They were dealing with "a high volume of calls" at the time.

It turns out that the police force were struggling to cope with a mammoth 40 incidents at the time.

What's not said is how many of those "incidents" were violent crimes in progress - how many officers were working that evening- how many of those incidents were police responding to were actually the aftermath of a crime- what incidents were prioritised ahead of thugs threatening to rape young women in their own flat- that is, what exactly is a primary emergency- and how many of those 40 incidents were actually classified as primary emergencies?

Funny the questions professional journalists fail to ask.