GREEN BAY, Wis. (WFRV) – Brown County Public Safety has been receiving a large influx of accidental 911 calls. Last week alone, they had nearly 1,000 false calls.

Communications Director Cullen Peltier says, “Normally, we get about 9,000 911 calls in a month, including hang-ups. While we don’t track specifically the hang-ups, we definitely know there’s been an increase.”

The primary reason for the uptick in calls is the warmer weather.

“People are out and about, sitting at soccer games, putting their phones in cup holders in their lawn chairs. They’re out jogging with smartwatches on. A lot of those factors contributed to the incidental dials,” Peltier explains.

People dialing 911 accidentally can be a problem for law enforcement because, for any call that is not confirmed as an emergency, officers are sent to the location of the call. Peltier says the false calls are an “inconvenience for the time it takes us to process these calls.”

To prevent mistakenly calling 911, Peltier says you may want to turn off convenient emergency features on your phone at certain times.

He explains, “For instance, if you know you’re going to be at a baseball game, around a group of people, you know you’re going to throw your phone in the cup holder, you can turn it off then and turn it back on when you leave. We’re just trying to avoid these situations that makes out common for people to call 911 by mistake.”

If you call 911 via cell phone in Brown County, they will also send you a text message for you to reply to so they can confirm whether your call was an emergency.