International Week of the Deaf 2021

International Week of the Deaf is celebrated annually across the world during the last full week of September. Superintendent Catherine Galloway has taken the opportunity to discuss ways you can contact our force if you are D/deaf or hard-of-hearing.

Full transcript:

Hello, I am Catherine Galloway, and I am Superintendent here at Force Control Room in Cleveland Police, and this week is International Week of the Deaf, and I wanted to take the opportunity to tell you about ways you can contact Cleveland Police if you are D/deaf or hard-of-hearing.

In an emergency, you can contact any of the emergency services through the emergencySMS service, but it's really important you register first. You text 'Register' to 999, and then what happens next is you receive a list of instructions. You must follow the instructions and reply 'yes' at the end, otherwise your phone will not be registered. Once registered, if you do find yourself in an emergency situation and you are texting our 999 service, remember that we need as much detail as possible in order to help you, so a handy tip is to stick to the three W's, and that is:
- Which emergency service? Now remember, this accesses all emergency services, so if it's the police you need, then tell us 'police'.
- What's wrong? Are you in imminent danger? Again, as much detail as possible but quickly.
- And then finally - where are you? What's your location where the incident is happening? If you're struggling with the location, then you can use something called what3words, and that can give you that can give you precise details that you can pass on to us, via the text.