111 failure: Police weren't sent to knife-point robbery

Police have blamed the failure to send a patrol car to a 111 call from a customer witnessing a knife-point robbery on an inexperienced operator.

Jo Anthony called 111 from her cellphone just after 5pm on Saturday when two men with a knife entered a dairy in Omokoroa Beach in the Bay of Plenty.

She told the Bay of Plenty Times the operator, in the Auckland-based northern communications centre, ended the call saying "Ok, thanks very much," and no police car arrived.

Police eventually visited the dairy yesterday.

Communications centre national manager Superintendent Steve Fitzgerald said police should have made the incident a priority and attended it.

"Certainly if I look at our volume of calls, the amount of mistakes, which do happen, and mistakes will happen from time to time, they are very very small, not that that would provide much comfort to the residents of Omokoroa.

"Principally we had a younger call taker, somebody who hadn't been there that long, and who made an error of judgment," he said.

The robbers fled the store, dropping a charity box they had stolen, and made their getaway in a blue station wagon.