Toronto police, emergency services launch campaign in effort to redirect calls from 911

Toronto officials have launched a new public awareness campaign in an effort to reduce the large number of non-emergency calls coming into the police 911 communications centre and to lower periods of lengthy wait times.

Dubbed the ‘Make the right call‘ campaign, posters at transit stations and social media messages will be shared on City of Toronto channels and public spaces.

Using examples like accessing social and mental supports, loud house parties, dead animals, there are requests to refer issues to services like 311, 211, 811 or the Toronto police non-emergency number.

The Toronto police communications centre is the first point of contact for anyone in the city who calls 911, and that includes people who are calling about medical-, fire- and crime-related emergencies.

“Seconds matter,” deputy police chief Lauren Pogue said during a news conference Monday morning.

“We want to empower the public with information that ensures everyone gets the right help when they need it, especially those in an emergency.”

Mayor Olivia Chow said non-emergency calls, or calls that could be diverted to other staffed services, account for around three out of every 10 calls to 911.

“By making the right call, we are helping other Torontonians that desperately need that 911 call responded to quickly and we owe it to each other to make the right call,” she said.

Pogue added hang-ups and pocket dials can bog down response times as operators need to follow-up with the callers.

“When you call 911 and you wait, stay on the line … and that takes valuable time away from those emergency calls as well,” she said.

“In one particular instance, the people had called and hung up several times and when the operator finally got through, they found out that another call operator was actually on the phone with them.”

As CityNews recently reported, wait times in the Toronto police 911 communications centre were just shy of 11 minutes and 45 seconds on Oct. 17.

“It’s absolutely atrocious,” newly elected TPA president Clayton Campbell told CityNews in response to our inquiry and after they heard similar information from their membership.

“Those are top-tier calls, right … and we also had 50 911 calls in pending. That’s 50 911 calls not being answered and it’s an absolute disgrace that’s happening in the city.”

Campbell said he’s been made aware of other recent instances of eight-to-nine-minute waits to get through to 911.

A representative for the Toronto Police Service wasn’t made available for an on-camera interview when CityNews asked the incident and other lengthy wait periods. A spokesperson said through statements they didn’t have specific information about Oct. 17. They said the current average answering time for 911 calls in October is a minute and seven seconds.

During Monday’s news conference, CityNews asked about the data kept to track 911 wait times and if the service would share more of it so the delays could be better understood.

“The data is available. I mean we keep data based on 15-minute increments, so our data is actually sound and we use that data to make decisions moving forward,” Kerry-Anne Murray-Bates, the manager of the Toronto police communications centre, said in response.

Both the service and the union cited recruiting and retention issues along with call volumes as contributing factors to occasional major delays in getting through to 911.

Toronto’s auditor general had similar findings in 2022 when the office examined 911 operations, which resulted in 26 recommendations in several areas.

After analyzing data between 2018 and 2021, the auditor general’s office found the Toronto Police Service on average didn’t meet the National Emergency Number Association (NENA)‘s standard of answering 90 per cent of 911 calls within 15 seconds and 95 per cent of calls within 20 seconds. They said call volume and staffing levels were the two biggest factors. They also noted many other jurisdictions had difficulties too.

The report said the average answer time in the three-year period was 28 seconds and the peak times were between 10 a.m. and 10 p.m.

A Toronto police spokesperson said as of mid-October, the average answering time for 911 calls for the month was a minute and seven seconds.

The service receives approximately 1.8 million calls a year with a large majority going to 911 versus the non-emergency number.

More to come.