Bungling cops asked a Broadway woman to check if there was a dead body in her street because they did not have the “resources” to do it themselves.

Deirdre Morrison was sleeping when the PSNI rang her at her Irwell Court home at 7am on Wednesday morning.

They told her a taxi driver had reported a dead body in the street, before asking the shocked West Belfast woman to go outside and check it out.

“I couldn’t believe it when the phone rang and it was the police,” said Deirdre.

“They had my name, address and number from a few months back because I had been in a shop that was robbed.

“They said they didn’t have the resources to send anyone down, and that they didn’t want to be lured into the area, so would I have a look around the street for them.”

“I told them that this must be a wind-up, but they said they were serious and ringing from Woodbourne barracks.”

A still-half-asleep Deirdre did as she was asked and peeked out her front door only to discover the supposed dead body was a drunken woman.

“The cop seemed relieved when I said it was just someone drunk. A couple of minutes later an ambulance and police patrol arrived,” she added.

“But it was really cheeky of them to ask me to do their job. Imagine if it had been a dead body, I would have been traumatised. This has just proved to me that the cops are incompetent and lazy.”

A spokeswoman for the PSNI said the phone call to Deirdre was an attempt to “establish the veracity” of the dead body report. She said there were concerns over the nature of the initial call and whether it was genuine.

The Broadway dead body debacle is not the first time the PSNI has found itself caught up in a self-inflicted farce. During the summer officers refused to chase vandals over a fence because of “health and safety issues”, while in January they refused to respond to an emergency call in case they were attacked with snowballs.