Scotland Yard's new multimillion-pound 999 call handling system is in crisis.
Police insiders have revealed how emergency calls are taking as long as 18 minutes to answer and calls are having to be diverted to police forces outside London.
The high placed sources told how police are spending nearly £200,000 a month on overtime for officers to man the system.
The devastating failures are connected with a £1.7 billion command, control, communications centres called C3i - which is being rolled out across the Metropolitan Police.
A crucial element of the scheme is a "contact handling system"; which staff at new call centres use to handle and process-999 calls.
However, insiders say the system cannot cope with the demand, causing "dangerous" delays to processing emergency calls.
The C3i project is aimed at streamlining the Met's 32 call handling centres which are expected to take about 23 million inquiries by 2010.
Three call centres, at Lambeth, Bow and Hendon, have been set up to handle the Met's 999 calls and send fast response cars to crime scenes. However, staff at the centres say the system is failing.
One London borough - Southwark - is said to have abandoned the system because of fears about officers' safety.
One police officer, who is handling calls, told the Evening Standard: "It's a disaster zone. At one point calls were being re-routed out of London to regional forces. All 999 calls are now being re-routed back to Scotland Yard.
"If we were selling insurance using this computer it would be fine but we are not, we are taking 999 calls from Londoners.
"The system is dangerous and the safety of London is in crisis. They have spent millions of pounds on a new computer system that does not work."
Scotland Yard insisted the difficulties were teething problems with the new computer system.
A spokesman said: "We immediately sought to resolve this by increasing 999 call-taker staffing levels.
"It was dreadful that calls took this long to answer but we took immediate steps to solve the problem."
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