Peel Regional Police officers say they’ve made progress in reducing emergency system wait times in Mississauga, Brampton and Caledon with the early adoption of “next-generation” 911 technology and extra staffing.
During a news conference at Peel Regional Police headquarters Tuesday morning, officials said calls to the service’s 911 communications centre dropped by 78 per cent over the past year and now 92 per cent of all 911 calls are answered within 15 seconds.
“This is about people, education and technology that have seen an impact,” Chief Nishan Duraiappah told reporters.
“Waiting on hold on 911 by any means is not acceptable, but to see us down from over a minute-and-a-half, two minutes average time to now to 14 seconds is quite a remarkable change here.”
The National Emergency Number Association (NENA), a non-profit organization dedicated to 911 operations, developed a national standard of answering 911 calls 90 per cent of the time in 15 seconds and 95 per cent of the time in 20 seconds. An NENA spokesperson previously told CityNews it was determined to be a “reasonable threshold” by experts and it has since become a benchmark for organizations across North America.
The issue of lengthy 911 wait times became a flashpoint in the summer of 2023. Peel Regional Police officers said a Brampton family called 911 to report an armed home invasion and waited nearly four minutes to speak with an operator before abandoning the call and reaching police later.
Weeks after the incident, Const. Tyler Bell-Morena said the initial call was placed in an automated call queue, which the home invasion victims left before an operator could answer.
“No one’s calling 911 (and) getting a call taker while screaming for help saying, ‘Please hold.’ That doesn’t happen,” he said as officers urged people who call 911 to stay on the line instead of hanging up and calling back, to avoid creating bottlenecks in the queue.
“We didn’t really have answers,” Brampton Mayor Patrick Brown said on Tuesday while reflecting on the incident.
“I remember being flabbergasted at the fact that in a country as prosperous as Canada, that we had wait times as long as they were in 911.”
It sparked a discussion among politicians and police services board members, eventually leading to an increased budget for adding staffing in the centre.
CityNews contacted the Peel Regional Police Association, the organization that represents unionized service members, to ask about any concerns with 911 wait times and to see if the amount granted meets staffing needs, but a response wasn’t received.
Officials said misuse of the 911 system has been a major factor impacting wait times.
“We heard stories about people calling for a pizza or a cricket game,” Brown said.
Officers said approximately 40 per cent of the one million calls that the Peel Regional Police Service receives annually are classified as misuse. The service publicly shared some of those calls in the past, such as someone who said their television wasn’t working properly.
“We talked about somebody calling 911 to say that their Tim Hortons coffee was cold or there was a cat stuck in the window. Meanwhile, people are backed up in the queue, suffering from real emergencies in our community that needed to get to us,” Duraiappah said.
He and other officials said that prompted the creation of a public awareness campaign aimed at cutting back on those calls. Deputy Chief Anthony Odoardi said there appears to be a 30-per-cent, year-over-year decline in misuse calls.
Odoardi and Duraiappah also said since the service adopted “next-generation” 911, which overhauls the back-end technical capabilities and will eventually give residents to communicate with emergency call-takers through text messages, photos and videos, it has freed up resources.
Officers said there have been approximately 75,000 hang-up calls to 911. An example of efficiency cited involved the need for call-takers to call every person back to make sure there wasn’t an emergency happening.
“Our technology has allowed us to have automated call-backs to discern whether it’s a valid emergency or not, and this has eliminated the need not only for us to call everybody back but for five additional people who were doing that 24/7,” Duraiappah said.
“Instead, those five people are able to reorient their interests to make sure we’re getting to the 911 calls we need to.”
The reported drop in calls comes as the Toronto Police Service continues to deal with lengthy 911 wait times. As CityNews previously reported, there have been instances where people have waited nearly 12 minutes to get through to its emergency call centre. Representatives with the service attributed delays on staffing shortages and call volumes.
“Of course, you have anomalies where we’ve had people waiting on 911 for 12 minutes as well, and certainly those are very few and far between. With the current technology, that will not happen again,” Odoardi said when asked by CityNews how long people have had to wait when calling Peel Regional Police.
The Toronto Police Service is in the process of putting in place its “next-generation” 911 system while also working on recruiting new staff members. In late October, the service in partnership with the City of Toronto and other emergency agencies launched an awareness campaign to redirect non-emergency calls away from 911.
CityNews contacted the Toronto Police Service on Tuesday to ask for an update, but a response wasn’t received by our deadline.
With files from The Canadian Press
