People's butt-cheeks are one of the culprits making up to 300 emergency calls in Toronto every day, and police say it could be putting people's lives at risk.

But it's not only when police are mistakenly called by phones in people's pockets that the force is worried about.

Unlocked phones in children's hands, purses or backpacks are also responsible for about 10 per cent of the city's 911 calls.

Now Toronto, York, Peel and Durham police say they won't accept these numbers sitting down.

Those police forces, along with the OPP, are launching an awareness campaign to encourage people to lock keypads or put phones on standby to avoid erroneous dialing.

Toronto police spokesperson Judy Broomfield from Toronto police says the situation has reached "epic proportions," with operators getting about 100,000 emergency calls every year.

"We are concerned it may be putting people's lives at risk," said Broomfield. "When we get pocket dials, we have to then determine if it's an emergency or not."

Doing that takes an average of two to three minutes, she says, costing operators about 625 minutes a day chasing bogus calls.

In one particularly bad pocket dial from a construction site, she says, a cruiser was dispatched because operators heard lots of background "noises and shouting."

Broomfield said these situations could cost two police officers as much as a half-an-hour to conclude (compared to helping people in a real emergency).

"People have to remember that we are going strictly on what we are hearing, from that we have to asses if the situation is serious," she added.

But it is not only pocket dials the force wants to pull the plug on. Children playing with the speed dial buttons on their parent's phone is also a concern emergency operators could deal without.

A technology expert told CTVToronto.ca that although pocket dials are possible with all phones, handsets with exposed keypads are the worst offenders.

Andrew Moore Crispin, editor of technology help website Butterscotch.com, says most mobile phone users will have had some sort of similar experience.

"I think we have all gone through something like pocket dialing," he said. "It can either be very funny or completely serious as we are seeing here."

He has the following advice for cell phone users:

● Feature phones (non-smartphones) can usually be locked by pressing two buttons, usually the star key and then the zero key or something similar.

● iPhone users must go into ‘Settings' and then ‘Security' to set up their screen locking system with a password or four-digit pass code.

● BlackBerry users must press the track ball and click ‘Lock screen' or ‘OK.'

● Android users have to go into ‘Settings' then ‘Location' and then ‘Security' to set up their locking system with anything from a four to 16 digit pass code.

But Moore Crispin said his favourite option on the Android system is a "lock pattern" when a user must drag their finger along the screen in a certain pattern that they can design themselves, like drawing a C or L .