"Sometimes, they make it easy on us:" Underage drinking party busted by 911 pocket dial call!

GERMANTOWN (WITI) -- A underage drinking party in Germantown is busted -- and it turns out someone at that party is the one who alerted police! Police say something that's been a chronic problem for the department, actually worked in its favor in this case!

Germantown police say the 911 call that came in from the underage drinking party was unintentionally dialed by a phone in someone's pocket.

About a dozen times a day, the Germantown Police Department takes a call from someone's pocket.

"Departments our size, it does chew up a lot of resources. They don`t even know that they called. It`s inadvertent," Germantown Police Lt. Todd Grenier said.

Lt. Grenier says his department has to follow up on every call that comes in. That means a lot of unnecessary work for a department with only a handful of officers on patrol at any given time.

"The number of pocket dial 911s we get far exceeds the amount of legitimate 911 calls we receive," Lt. Grenier said.

Recently, the problem actually worked in the Germantown Police Department's favor. Dispatchers got a call from a high school student's pocket.

"The dispatchers in the background could hear, you know, people talking in the background," Lt. Grenier said.

When officers tracked the call to a home on the village's south side, they discovered a party underway. The surprised teenagers inside were caught red-handed.

"We ended up citing eight people for underage drinking," Lt. Grenier said.

Describing the incident on their Facebook page, Germantown police wrote: "Sometimes, they make it easy on us."

Germantown police say a lot of the 911 pocket dials come from Galaxy phones, because some of them have a feature that allows one-touch 911 calls.

Police ask that people lock their phones to help cut down on the problem.

Related stories: