Almost two million calls to Scotland’s police force were ended before being answered by a member of staff in the last three years.
Data obtained by the Scottish Tories under freedom of information showed 1,878,727 calls to both non-emergency and emergency numbers were abandoned between the beginning of 2018 and last November.
Police Scotland said these "discontinued" calls are where a caller hangs up before they speak to a service advisor.
More than 99 per cent of the abandoned calls were to the non-emergency number 101.
In 2020, the first year of the pandemic, the number of discontinued calls to 101 rose from 284,239 to 919,790.
The number of discontinued calls to 999 stayed fairly stable at around 4,700 in both years.
However the number of calls to 999 waiting more than two minutes to be answered jumped 17-fold from 2019 to 2020, from 150 to 2,624.
Scottish Tory justice spokesman Jamie Greene described the figures as “absolutely staggering”.
He said: “Our officers are doing their best under severe pressure, but they are simply not being given the resources they need by the SNP Government.
“This situation is completely unacceptable and unsustainable going forward.
“We cannot have this huge volume of calls from members of the public going unanswered when they could be alerting police to serious incidents.”
Mr Greene alluded to the case of Lamara Bell, who died after police took three days to respond to calls of a car crash near Stirling in 2015.
The driver, John Yuill, died in the initial collision, but Ms Bell survived and was taken to hospital, where she died four days later.
Mr Greene said: “We have seen tragedies occur before in Scotland when calls have been missed.
“These figures must be a wake-up call for SNP ministers to guarantee officers can answers calls as promptly as possible. If not, this could again have devastating consequences.”
He also called for greater funding for Police Scotland, saying the call figures were “a damning indictment” of the SNP’s failures to fund the force correctly.
With the Scottish Budget for 2022/23 debated at Holyrood next week, the Tories are pushing for a £36.5 million increase on the force’s budget of £1.34 billion.
Assistant Chief Constable John Hawkins said the force had just announced “significant investment in new technology to further protect and strengthen our emergency 999 and non-emergency 101 services”.
He said: “At the end of last year, we introduced a range of measures to boost our 101 and 999 services, both of which performed well over the festive period against a backdrop of high demand and significant absence.
“Police Scotland receives more than 3m public contacts each year and our committed officers and staff continue to prioritise our 999 emergency calls which are answered in under 10 seconds on average.
“While we prioritised 999 calls throughout the coronavirus pandemic, we have maintained our 101 service despite high levels of absence and reduced capacity due to physical distancing.
“Many of these discontinued 101 calls will be cases where callers have been instructed to hang up and dial 999 or they have decided to redial and select another option from a pre-recorded menu, they have opted to contact us via our website or they have realised they should be calling another agency. A significant number of both 999 and 101 calls are misdialled - callers realise and hang up.”
A Scottish Government spokesman said: “As Police Scotland have made clear, they have taken all necessary steps to protect the critical emergency 999 and non-emergency 101 services throughout the pandemic.
“The total budget for policing in 2022/23 is almost £1.4 billion, including an additional £40.5m increase in resource funding and a further £6.6m to mitigate the impact of Covid on the policing budget.
“And despite cuts to the Scottish Government’s capital budget we have more than doubled the police capital budget since 2017-18, supporting continued investment in police assets including the estate, vehicle fleet, specialist equipment and ICT to ensure officers have the tools they need to do their jobs effectively.”
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