New phone procedure may discourage prank callers
By John Fulwlitor
Staff Reporter
A new procedure for handling
threatening, obscene and annoying
phone calls will make reporting those
calls easier and will decrease police
workload, UNL Police Sgt. Bill Man
ning said.
The procedure is simple, Manning
said. When people receive a threat
ening, obscene or annoying phone
call, they need only to hang up and
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The procedure then traces the call
and stores information about the
caller in a telephone company com
puter.
The new service, offered by the
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son making the calls.
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to take legal action, the phone com
pany will release the information to
the police. Users of the service will
not be given the phone number of the
traced call.
According to Lincoln Telephone
Co., prank phone calls are prohibited
by law. The maximum penalty for
violation is a $500 fine and three
months in prison.
Previously when students received
prank calls, they had to call the phone
company or the police department to
report the calls and request a phone
trap. Manning said.
If the calls occurred when the
phone company was closed. Manning
said, victims had to wait until the
phone company re-opened.
Students who were pranked also
had to record each legitimate phone
call they received to compare with the
list of trapped calls.
The new procedure makes that
unnecessary, he said.
Handling prank-call cases con
sumed a considerable amount of po
lice time. Manning said. Since the
start of the semester, he said, the uni
versity police have handled 45 new
cases and followed up on 100 others.
Lela Kelliher, spokeswoman for
Lincoln Telephone Co., said the new
method was much better.
“It’s a much more efficient and
effective means of tracing,” she said,
“because it can happen right away,
the minute the obscene call is re
ceived.”
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