EDMONTON – An Edmonton woman says city police are “failing miserably” when it comes to emergency response times, and has the numbers to prove it.
Cheryl Schneider’s quest to get them began this past summer, when she had to wait nearly an hour for police to respond to a disturbance at her fitness studio. She filed a formal complaint with the Edmonton Police Service, but didn’t stop there.
Schneider decided to perform a Freedom of Information request on police response times, and says she was shocked by the results.
“What I found out was very alarming…The response time targets are not being met – in fact, they’re really quite low.”
According to the statistics provided to Schneider, when it came to Priority 1 calls, police met their response time target seven per cent less often this year than in 2011. And in the summer months, that dropped to 16 per cent less than two years ago.
“Why is it this summer we had a deplorable response time when the dispatch calls were lowering? Why is that, Chief of Police?…How do we fix this in Edmonton?”
Thursday afternoon, Edmonton police sent out the following response:
“The EPS received a letter from Ms. Cheryl Schneider on Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2013.
In that letter, Ms. Schneider raises concerns about EPS response times and the increase in calls for service.
The EPS is gathering the appropriate information and verifying numbers so that we can respond to Ms. Schneider’s concerns and questions.
I want to assure the citizens of Edmonton that when you call 911 or the non-emergency number, and you require the assistance of a police officer, the EPS will respond as quickly as we can.
With the city’s boundaries and population growing, so do our calls for service. It is becoming more of a challenge to get to lower-priority calls for service, as quickly as we would like to. Demands have steadily grown.
Year to date, for 2013 and 2012, the EPS has seen an increase in dispatched calls by 4.3%, or 4,479 calls to be exact.
Once we’ve collected all the data that we need, the EPS will provide a response to Ms. Schneider’s concerns and questions. That information will also be shared with the media.
– Acting Chief Brian Simpson”
The Chair of the Edmonton Police Commission, Shami Sandhu, adds that Priority 4 calls have seen the greatest increase (according to the data, there have been more than 4,000 of those calls this year compared to 2011).
Sandhu explains officers often have to drop what they’re doing to attend the Priority 1 calls when they come in, which can take some time.
And with arrests up 9.5 per cent over last year, he says officers are having to spend more time doing paperwork.
But there are plans in the works for dealing with the issue.
In addition to recently building a new station in the city’s southwest, the EPS is in the processing of adding one in Edmonton’s northwest, which should help with response times.
This summer, 48 positions were added to the service, and a request to the City has been put in for 175 more officers over the next five years.
“The more frontline police officers we have should definitely help with response times,” Sandhu says.
Whether the City will be able to find the money for new staff in its budget, though, remains to be seen.
You can see the full report Schneider received on calls to EPS and its response times below:
With files from Fletcher Kent, Global News
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