Nearly 20 percent of calls to the police emergency number from January through November last year were not urgent and included routine inquiries, according to a survey by the National Police Agency.

Of the 8,206,502 calls to the emergency number, excluding pranks and silent calls, 19.4 percent required no urgent response, the agency said.

Among these calls, 765,960 were mundane inquiries about the location of nearby facilities such as 24-hour gas stations, while 682,896 were other requests and complaints, such as those about cheating spouses.

The number of accidental calls, including those resulting from dialing erroneous company extension numbers, stood at 144,622.

An NPA official urged the public to only use the police emergency number — 110 — for urgent matters, saying, “If less urgent calls come in at the same time as emergency ones, we could end up arriving at a site too late.”

Of all emergency calls received during the 11-month period, traffic-related incidents such as crashes and illegal parking totaled 2,783,660, followed by those about crimes or suspicious individuals (1,176,241) and requests for the police to take custody of intoxicated people or those suffering from dementia(462,007). Disaster-linked calls stood at 71,258.

Of the total, 72.6 percent — or a record 5,958,662 calls — were made from mobile phones.

Tokyo’s Metropolitan Police Department received the highest number of emergency calls at 1,260,820, followed by the Osaka Prefectural Police (726,582) and the Kanagawa Prefectural Police (653,939).