Officers facing challenge to respond promptly

Commission trying to determine best path to using city’s patrol resources most effectively

City patrol officers are struggling to meet response time targets as call volumes continue to rise, says a new report to the Edmonton Police Commission presented Thursday.

Since 2013, patrol response times have been declining and last year saw an overall drop in response time performance of 2.3 per cent from 2018, said the semi-annual report that measures dispatch call volumes and response time performance.

Combined with multiple years of rising call volumes, officers are facing challenges to respond promptly, especially for “non-urgent” calls.

“When somebody is in a crisis, we need to get somebody there now, not (in) an average response time,” said Edmonton police Chief Dale Mcfee outside of the meeting.

“If we’re going to try to be the safest city in Canada, which was our previous mission statement that we’re working on as well, then average isn’t going to get us there.”

DISPATCH CALL VOLUMES

Dispatch call volumes are calls made by the public that are classified with a priority level from one to five, which are dispatched to patrol officers.

They indicate the workload patrol officers face.

The report states officers attended 173,587 calls, a 2.2 per cent increase compared to last year, which amounts to 3,700 more calls.

However, this growth is in line with what is expected from the city’s annual population growth.

Mcfee said the increase for calls of service is a concern and something that needs to be focused on.

In particular, police need to look at how many of those calls are the same ones officers are attending over and over.

“The concern that we really got to go after is reducing our calls for service, but reducing our calls for service means those repeat calls for service equally as much as the initial calls for service,” Mcfee said.

“We don’t want people to stop calling us, we just want to have a more effective manner to get them connected to something so they don’t need to call us.”

There has been an increase in call volume for low-urgency Priority 4 and Priority 5 calls, which make up 92 per cent of calls. Increases in call volumes from 2018 to 2019 have been concentrated in theft from vehicle (26 per cent), trespassing (26 per cent), fraud (15 per cent) and Mental Health Act complaints (13 per cent).

The number of Priority 1 calls in 2019 remained unchanged compared to 2018, but Priority 2 calls decreased by 2.1 per cent.

Priority 3 calls decreased 12.3 per cent while Priority 4 calls increased by six per cent. Priority 5 calls dropped by one per cent.

RESPONSE TIME PERFORMANCE

Response time is how long it takes for officers to dispatch, travel and arrive on-scene to an event.

There is a targeted time to arrive, varying on the priority level of a call.

For Priority 1 calls, the targeted time is seven minutes, while Priority 5 calls have a targeted time of 180 minutes.

Overall response time performance for Priority 1-5 calls fell to 61 per cent from 63.3 per cent in 2018.

However, specific targets for Priority 2 and 3 calls are being met despite a decrease in performance, while Priority 1, 4 and 5 call response times continue to drop.

Downtown division had the strongest response time performance for Priority 1, 2 and 3 calls where more than 80 per cent of events met the timed target.

However, there was a “considerable deterioration” in its Priority 4 and 5 response time performance which the report attributes to a significant seven per cent increase in call volume year-over-year for the division.

Southwest division had the slowest Priority 1-5 response times, which in part was attributed to the division’s large geographical range.

Some areas being examined to address response times include changing division boundaries and better use of deployment tools such as GPS.

“We’re here to serve the public but at the same time, we’ve got to balance and we’ve got to use our resources in the most effective and appropriate manner to keep our people safe and that’s what we’re going to do,” Mcfee said.

If we’re going to try to be the safest city in Canada ... then average isn’t going to get us there.