Are police fast enough? on 911 emergency calls
Date: Jun 24, 2006 11:42 AM
PUBLICATION: WINNIPEG FREE PRESS
DATE: 2006.06.24
PAGE: A6
BYLINE: Bruce Owen
SECTION: City
WORD COUNT: 1533

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Are police fast enough? Crunching the numbers on 911 emergency calls

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LAST Saturday, Pete Debungee encountered unspeakable cruelty on the
streets of Winnipeg.

The 45-year-old grandfather was “curb-stomped,” his head forced on a
concrete street curb and trampled, after he tried to stop some men from
stealing his beer.

He died in hospital Tuesday.

Those close to the scene outside the Maryland Hotel say a hotel employee
phoned 911 twice in the 45 minutes before Debungee was attacked,
complaining about the disruptive behaviour of the gang outside the
hotel, but officers arrived only when it was too late.

Debungee’s family and others say if police had responded to the earlier
calls, he’d still be alive.

Police say they did their best based on the information they had.

When they got the third 911 call — the one that told them a man was
being attacked — officers arrived within a minute.

Should police have responded sooner? It’s a question that haunts
Debungee’s family, the officers involved and the 911 operators who
assign priorities to each call they take.

Since 2004, Winnipeg police have used a new computer-aided dispatch
system to assign priorities to each call and then dispatch officers.

Priority 0 is the most grievous, a life-or-death situation, and Priority
9 is the least serious, like graffiti on a garage. Police respond much
faster to Priorities 0, 1 and 2, and in some cases can take several days
to respond to the lower priority calls.

The new system was designed to help 911 operators better manage an
ever-increasing number of calls. In 2005, police communication staff
handled about 600,000 calls and dispatched officers to 170,000
incidents, about 6,000 more than the year before, according to police
statistics.

Some officers blame the new dispatch system, and the new call-priority
grading system, for increasing response times to some important calls.

Winnipeg Police Association spokesman Loren Schinkel said in some
instances, the system focuses too much on managing calls, and not enough
on dispatching officers.

“I know that response times have gone up dramatically,” Schinkel said,
blaming a shortage of officers and the sheer volume of calls.

“You can’t be everything for everyone at all times,” he said.

Some Winnipeggers have complained publicly about police showing up too
late, or not at all, to arrest car thieves, home invaders, shoplifters
or drunk drivers.

On June 4, residents at an Osborne Village-area apartment building
caught a man apparently breaking into vehicles. They had to hold him for
about an hour before police showed up. According to Schinkel, it can
take police four to five days to investigate some crimes, like
break-ins.

Police chief Jack Ewatski acknowledged there have been some growing
pains with the new system, even two years later.

But he said the police service is continually training 911 communication
staff to make sure they get the right information from callers to help
them priorize each call.

“It’s only as good as the information you get,” he said.

There were about 100 calls in the 911 queue last month when John
Vandusen was attacked and stabbed in his North End home.

It was a Saturday night, May 21.

Despite two frantic calls to 911 — one by his girlfriend and another by
a neighbour — police took about two hours to arrive.

“The initial call was of disorderly youths,” police Sgt. Kelly Dennison
explained at the time. “It was assigned as a (low) priority five.” That
911 call came in at 6:30 p.m..

The second 911 call came in at 8:58 p.m. when the confrontation
escalated and Vandusen was attacked in his house.

Dennison said the call was then upped to a priority three, but 911 staff
increased it to a priority two at 9:02 p.m.

Eight minutes later, a patrol car was dispatched, and arrived at
Vandusen’s house at 9:17 p.m.

Total time elapsed? 19 minutes.

By then Vandusen, 49, had been beaten and stabbed. His attackers only
fled when his girlfriend released the couple’s two Rottweilers from
their kennel.

“How we respond to serious crimes is very good,” Ewatski said in a
recent interview on the 911 system. “The numbers tell me that
information is coming in very quickly and being dispatched quickly.”
Here are those numbers: The average response time to high-priority
emergencies in 2005 was seven minutes and eight seconds. (Response time
is the time between when a 911 call is received and when the first
officer arrives on the scene.) That’s more than two minutes longer than
it was in 2004.

Some people consider response times a top measure of police performance;
others say it only really matters to someone who’s called 911.

“Everybody thinks what happens to them is of primal importance,” says
University of Winnipeg criminology professor Michael Weinrath.

“What people don’t realize is how few police cars there are in their
neighbourhood. There are only so many police around.” Police response
times are generally getting longer as officer workload increases and the
number of calls for service goes up, not only in Winnipeg, but for
police in every major city in North America.

At 8:30 p.m. last Saturday, the night Debungee was attacked, for
example, there were 46 other calls requesting police in Winnipeg’s
downtown alone.

Ewatski said average police response times from 1999 to 2003 (see chart)
were compiled under the old record-keeping system. The numbers for 2004
and last year are from the new computer system.

From 1999 to 2003, average response times rose to a high of almost 10
minutes in 2002 and then fell to about six minutes the following year.

More importantly, Ewatski said, the amount of time serious calls stay in
the queue — the time between when a call is taken to when it is
dispatched — was cut in half in 2003 from 2002, when it was more than
four minutes. The average queue time in 2005 was 1.97 minutes.

“Most high-priority calls do not sit in the queue long,” Ewatski said.

In Winnipeg, police now treat all domestic calls as high priority, a
decision some say has officers run off their feet. The emphasis on
domestic calls flowed from the murders of sisters Doreen Leclair and
Corrine McKeown. They were stabbed to death Feb. 16, 2000, by McKeown’s
boyfriend, Bill Dunlop, who is now serving a life sentence.

The women made five calls to police in the eight hours before they died,
but cars were only sent after the first and last calls.

What also influences police times is Winnipeg’s use of two-man patrol
units to handle emergency calls instead of dispatching single officers,
critics say. (Winnipeg has a minimum of 27 two-man patrol cars on the
road at all times).

The Frontier Centre For Public Safety has said front-line patrol
coverage can be doubled by using two one-officer units instead of one
two-officer unit. Beat sizes can be cut in half, leading to faster
response times.

Calgary, for example, uses both two-officer and single-officer units
from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m., with single officers responding to minor calls.

Calgary police are currently reviewing that policy in the wake of an
inquiry into the October 2003 fatal police shooting of Sudanese
immigrant Deng Fermino Kuol. Const. Ira Macumber shot a drunken Kuol
twice in his neck after Kuol attacked him with a knife.

Calgary police are now looking at how they can better dispatch
two-officer units to situations where there is a potential for violence.

In Winnipeg, two-man units are entrenched in the union contract, and
said to be the best way to ensure officer safety.

Schinkel said response times could be improved with the hiring of more
officers. The current complement of officers is 1,254. In 1998, the year
Ewatski became chief, there were 1,206 officers.

Statistics Canada, in a report last December, said Winnipeg had more
police officers per capita than many Canadian cities, including Toronto.

As to recent complaints police have taken too long to respond to
complaints, Ewatski said he believes “those are few and far between.”
What matters, he said, is how the public views overall how police are
doing their job. The service is in the middle of a telephone opinion
survey, done by eNRG Research. It was completed June 16.

Its findings will be released to the public at a later date.

How quickly do police show up in other cities? Average police response
times (minutes) to high- priority emergency calls (most recent
available): Winnipeg (2005) 7.08 Calgary (2004) 5.09 Montreal (2004)
6.03 Ottawa (2005) 8.9 Toronto (2003) 8.0 Hamilton (2004) 9.11 Target is
under 10.0 Response times depend on traffic conditions, weather
conditions, time of day, location of call and information provided to
911 dispatcher.

Putting a priority on calls Winnipeg police have a nine-priority 911
call system. Here are the top four: l Priority 0: Specifically
identified situations where a known crisis exists that threatens the
life of an individual.

l Priority 1: Situations where an imminent threat to personal safety
exists or the loss of or damage to property exists. Conditions at the
scene of the call are unstable.

l Priority 2: Situations where no immediate threat of harm exists at the
scene of the call. A timely response is very desirable but not
mandatory.

l Priority 3: Situations involving stable conditions at the scene of a
call, which may be handled at the convenience of available units as
competing demands permit for the dispatcher.

For more information, go to www.winnipeg.ca/police/ and follow the link
Reporting Emergencies on the right-side column.

What are police doing to speed up response times? l Computer-aided
dispatch: Started in 2004 along with new call priority management
system.

Allows 911 call-takers to quickly assign a priority to an emergency call
and dispatch a patrol car.

l False alarms: More than a year ago, police changed their alarm policy.
Alarm companies now have to verify an alarm before police are
dispatched.

The number of alarm calls to which police are dispatched has now fallen
about 80 per cent.

l 311: The city is also looking at a 311 city information line to cut
down the number of nuisance calls to the 911 operators, calls like,
“What day is my garbage day?” Operators get about 100 bogus calls a day.