Revision of China’s police law is under way as the nation works to deal with an excessively-large quantity of reports made to the police that are not related to the duties police are responsible for.

While it is a catch phrase in China to tell people to call the police whenever one is in trouble, reports to police in China have reportedly exceeded the normal demands, including many calls to ask for directions or a pipe repair, or even to ask if there is anyone that would like to chat.

Some 40 percent of the reports to police are such non-policing activities in Suzhou city in east China’s Jiangsu province, which is a city of 13 million people. In 2015, the figure rose to 58.8 percent, including 28,000 harassment calls made to the police, according to Legal Daily.

From January to May, the police of Yichun city of east China’s Jiangxi province received 471,000 reports and only 16.2 percent of these fell into the area of police activities, the newspaper noted.

Many people believe that making a call to the police can solve any problem, which is a misunderstanding. Those calls with non-policing related matters have to be transferred to other departments in charge, according to Ren Wenchao, a deputy director at the public security bureau of Dalian in northeast China’s Liaoning province.

Such problematic phenomenon is rooted in an unclear definition of Chinese police duties. The police have been excessively involved in non-policing activities in China, leading many to believe that police can help handle all issues, professor Yu Lingyun at Tsinghua University told Legal Daily.

China is revising the police law and it has become a focus of legislators to address the non-policing activity reports to police, the newspaper added.

The Ministry of Public Security (MPS) has launched a nationwide campaign from May to July to reduce non-policing reports made to Chinese police officers, Legal Daily reported.