As BC's 9-1-1 agency struggles, callers wait longer to report crimes & get help

After years of robbing Peter to pay Paul, the agency that handles most 9-1-1 calls in British Columbia is increasingly struggling to keep up with calls from its public.

That has both affected its ability to connect callers with dispatchers, and left it neglecting non-emergency callers altogether.

Facing staffing shortages, E-Comm 9-1-1 has only been able to keep up with the flood of urgent calls by pulling staff from the non-emergency police lines it is also supposed to answer. That’s leading huge numbers of callers to hang up before ever getting to speak to a person on the other end of the line. And in Abbotsford, some 9-1-1 callers are also facing increasingly long waits to talk to a person who can actually send help on its way.

Abbotsford’s police chief has declared the situation “unacceptable,” and his department has hired their own staff, at the cost of more than $100,000 each year, to do a job they’ve already paid E-Comm to do.

While E-Comm says it knows it it is trying to improve its responses, officials are also warning the public that they might need to accept that not all non-emergency calls end up being answered by an actual human.

How it works

Wherever you are in BC, if you dial 9-1-1, it is probably an E-Comm dispatcher who answers the phone. And usually, they pick up right away: 98% of calls are answered within two seconds. E-Comm is very proud of that statistic and the fact that it has met its targets on the figure for more than 15 years.

But increasingly, the necessary prioritization of immediately answering those vitally important calls is leaving E-Comm and its overworked employees unable to meet other key duties. And that can have significant consequences.

Emergency calls can take a circuitous route that can make the matter complicated, but here is generally how it works.

When a person first calls 9-1-1, an E-Comm staffer picks up and asks where you live and if you need an ambulance, firefighter response, or police. They’ll then move your call into a new queue for your location and call type. While you’re waiting in that queue, the dispatcher stays on the line with you. But while that dispatcher can provide guidance, if needed, but can’t actually send a first-responder to help.

If you need a paramedic, BC EHS is then in charge of picking up your call from the queue and taking further details. If you need a fire or police response, the matter may go to that emergency service’s own dispatchers. But some municipalities—including Abbotsford in the Fraser Valley—also contract E-Comm to handle that second call. (In other Fraser Valley communities, dispatchers at RCMP call centres or in Surrey handle that second-stage of calls. But in much of the rest of the Lower Mainland, E-Comm provides dispatch services like it does in Abbotsford.)

E-Comm has one other big job: answer non-emergency calls for many municipalities and jurisdictions (again, including Abbotsford). Those include calls to the main phone lines of police departments by people who might be looking to report a crime or trying to contact an officer.

So E-Comm handles three categories of calls: Emergency Call Number 1; Emergency Call Number 2; Non-emergency calls.

Answering that first call is the first vital task E-Comm has, and it has largely been able to keep up those calls, even as their number has increased. But doing so has come at a cost. To prioritize those most-urgent of calls, it has pulled resources away from dealing with its other crucial commitments. As that has occurred, wait times are growing for those in that queue to get help actually sent to them needing a response to that second set of is leaving callers in desperate need of help waiting for a dispatcher to pick up the phone.

More calls, longer waits

Last year, E-Comm answered nearly 49,000 emergency calls intended for Abbotsford Police, according to figures provided to The Current. They were among more than one million 9-1-1 calls in British Columbia.

Almost all of those (more than E-Comm’s 95% target) were picked up within five seconds by that first call-taker. But to get to the second person—the one who would be able to directly connect the caller to the help they need—it sometimes took much longer.

In Abbotsford, 84% of callers were connected to that second call-taker within 10 seconds. That was short of the 88% target (but a slight improvement from the previous year).

Some callers, though, waited much longer: one in 20 spent more than a minute waiting to talk to someone who could send police help immediately.

E-Comm’s communications vice-president Dave Campbell says those troubling moments are made easier by the fact that the initial dispatcher waits with the caller and can provide guidance and direction. And some those waiting callers may be in a queue because of call surges that occur when multiple people dial 9-1-1 about the same situation.

Still, the figures reveal that—whether linked to call surges or not—people calling in desperate need of help can end up waiting far longer than five seconds to talk to someone who can send help.

Last year, in Abbotsford alone, around 2,400 9-1-1 callers (an average of seven each day) spent more than a minute waiting in the queue to be connected to that second dispatcher.

‘The ones that really scare me’

The biggest worry for Abbotsford Police Chief Mike Serr, though, is not actually the speed with which emergency calls are handled. Serr is concerned about the massive waits facing those who call his department’s non-emergency line, which, in Abbotsford, E-Comm is responsible for.

And it’s those callers who have suffered most as E-Comm tries to keep up with the volume of 9-1-1 calls.

E-Comm’s goal is to answer 80% of non-emergency calls within three minutes. Last year, it answered fewer than one-third of calls during that time. In fact, 60% of all callers waited on hold for more than 10 minutes. Perhaps unsurprisingly, huge numbers of callers—more than half of all those who called—hung up before ever speaking to anyone.

That can have serious consequences, Serr told The Current.

The department recently started a trial program in which it hired its own staff to triage non-emergency calls and deal with them before they get to an E-Comm worker. Since starting that program, workers have regularly—every day, Serr says—talking with people who should really be calling 9-1-1.

Prior to Abbotsford hiring its own call-takers, those people would have faced long waits to hear from a call-taker that they need and deserve an emergency response.

“Those are the ones that really scare me,” Serr said.

The slow responses and high call rates are problematic in other respects. When people call police to report crimes, that information isn’t just used to potentially start an investigation. Indeed, while often nothing can be done, that information is needed so police can identify trends and patterns and either deter or arrest those behind them. Serr worries that if residents stop reporting crimes because they feel it’s too much of a hassle, then police might not know to increase patrols in places where, say, car thieves are particularly active.

“One of the biggest issues facing us in policing right now, is ensuring that our community can get hold of the police,” Serr said.

The Abbotsford Police Department’s new call triage program will cost the department—and taxpayers—more than $100,000 each year. (The program is being operated on a trial basis.) That money is being spent on work that the department has already contracted E-Comm to do.

“I think anybody who pays for a service and isn’t fully satisfied is going to be frustrated,” Serr said. “When we moved to E-Comm six years ago, we did it solely with the understanding that they would be responsible for all our telephone communication. And for us now to have to triage and bring our own service in [house] for a short period of time is frustrating.”

‘Not acceptable’

The issue goes well beyond Abbotsford, and has been a topic of conversation between police chiefs from around British Columbia.

“We’ve made it very clear to senior management and the E-Comm board that we are very concerned,” Serr said. “We’ve made it clear we need changes immediately.”

E-Comm’s management, for its part, isn’t pretending that the status quo is fine. While its most-recent media releases bragged about the organization meeting its targets for answering initial 9-1-1 calls, Campbell (E-Comm’s communications vice-president) bluntly admitted that it is failing to do all its jobs.

He described the agency’s response to non-emergency calls in Abbotsford as “significant underperformance” and “not an acceptable result.”

He said E-Comm’s board and management is “highly committed to fixing this” and has already undertaken steps to do so.

But it won’t be easy; because E-Comm is facing two separate issues.

Too much work, not enough workers

First, E-Comm has some of the same staffing shortages facing other parts of BC’s health care system. Simply, there is too much high-pressure work to do, and not enough trained people to do it.

Everybody acknowledges that the people who are actually taking the calls are doing their utmost to keep up with the demand. What those workers need is help from more colleagues.

The workers for 9-1-1 operators has described the system as being “critically understaffed” with workers being forced to work overtime.

E-Comm says it is trying to hire more workers. But Campbell says solving the problem won’t be that easy. Because the agency also needs to stop the exodus of stressed-out staff. To do that, Campbell says the organization is boosting mentorship, training and mental health assistance.

“It's a pretty stressful job, answering 911 calls and in years past that has translated into pretty significant turnover rates as people get burned out,” he said. “We want to be looking after our staff in a way that we're giving them the support they need.”

The other challenge might be even harder to address.

The number of 9-1-1 calls has increased at a staggering pace in recent years, more than doubling since 2014.

Part of that is due to more people needing help. The province’s population is increasing, and that population is getting older and older. The opioid crisis and climate change-related disasters like floods and wildfires have only aggravated the call surges.

But the biggest change has been the increasing prevalence of cell phones. Now nearly everyone has a smart phone they can use to immediately call 9-1-1 if they drive past an accident on the highway or see flames nearby. Accidental and unnecessary calls only add to the workload.

Can tech provide the solution?

E-Comm is also facing the legislated need to roll out next-generation 9-1-1 technology in the next several years. That technology will give dispatchers a bevy of new data, including the locations of those who call 9-1-1. The hope is that it will “lead to safer, faster and more informed emergency responses,” the Canadian Radio and Television Corporation says.

It may ease some inefficiencies. It will, for instance, provide a call back number that will ease the trouble that arises for emergency personnel after someone calls 9-1-1 then promptly hangs up. During call surges, it could allow dispatchers to filter between the sixth call about a highway accident and a new emergency that hasn’t yet been reported.

In the short term, the technology will create a huge amount of work for E-Comm. When The Current spoke to Serr, he was positive about the changes, but worried that it would continue to push up the cost for the municipalities and agencies that contribute to the agency’s operations. Since that interview, the province has pledged $90 million to help E-Comm prepare and deploy the new technology and $60 million to the Union of BC Municipalities to help pay for increased staffing and training costs.

But while next-gen 9-1-1 will be useful to connect to some urgent callers, older, more-familiar technology might already exist to deal with the backlog of non-emergency calls, both Serr and Campbell said. But not everyone will love the solution: robots. (Or as Campbell describes them: digital assistants.)

Huge numbers of those calling police non-emergency lines don’t actually need to speak to a police officer. To begin with, many calls actually have nothing to do with police: many callers are actually seeking help from ICBC, city hall, provincial government ministries, or various other government bureaucracies.

A key goal of the APD’s triage program is to weed out those callers and send them where they can actually get help. Digital assistants might also be able to help with that. In doing so, they could ensure that people who actually need to talk to a call-taker about a police situation are talking to a human quicker.

The robots could also provide information on wait times and, potentially, call-back options—Campbell noted that many people are hanging up only a couple minutes after being placed on hold.

“It's not so much a problem of people having to wait, it's the fact that they don't know how long they're going to have to wait,” he said.

Then there are those who call to file a police report.

Serr said that while those reports are extremely important, most can be made online or even by text. And while it may be a pain to do so, not tying up a phone line can help those who really do need to talk to a person.

Part of the challenge is getting the public to realize that the police aren’t able to go full-CSI to figure out, say, who broke your windshield.

Serr himself recently had his car broken into in another jurisdiction.

“I would have loved to be able to find out who did it, but at the end of the day I knew based on where my car was parked, based on the circumstances… there was no real physical evidence or anything that police could go on and I think that's a bit of common sense sometimes.”

The information is still useful. It allows police to dedicate resources to places with multiple reports of crime, and might provide information down the line that could help you get your property back.

But Serr said realism is required:

“Some things don't require police follow up.”

The cash question

Both Campbell from E-Comm and Serr of the APD, agree that the current situation is unacceptable and that digital solutions might be key to overcoming them. But, speaking before the BC government’s announced funding boost, they differed on one important point, and it may be the most important factor of all: whether E-Comm needs more money to do the jobs it has committed to doing.

“I believe they’re well-funded,” Serr said. “I believe strategically, they need to make some good business decisions moving forward that’s going to support the work that they do and support everybody who contributes to them. “

Campbell, though, said E-Comm may indeed need more money—though the agency is wary of pleading poverty to cities with whom it already has contracts.

“We have to be respectful of our municipal clients’ and stakeholders’ ability to pay, so while we always, for the reasons I’ve talked about, need more resources, we also always have to strive to maximize the resources we have and respect our partners’ ability to pay.”

In the meantime, both emergency service providers—and especially the individual call-takers—will have to make do with what they have.

“The woman or man who busts their guts at EComm every single day, they're under enormous stress, they’re working unbelievable overtime,” Serr said. “We have the ultimate respect for them and the work that they're doing,” he said. “We are hopeful that if we all work together that we can find some solutions; it’s absolutely critical that if someone needs the police, that they call us so we can effectively address their concerns.”