The emergency dispatch service that is the first point of contact for 911 callers in 25 regional districts in B.C. says it has seen a 21 per cent increase in calls this year over the same five-month period in 2022.
In May alone, E-Comm marked its busiest month in the service’s history.
“We cannot pinpoint one specific factor responsible for driving this increase in demand, but extreme heat and wildfires have historically impacted summer call volumes, and the return of pre-COVID activities including tourism, social gatherings and events are also likely contributors to the increased demand for emergency services,” said Kelly Furey, an E-Comm media relations specialist, in an email Wednesday.
Furey said an April update to the Android operating system has also contributed to a global increase in auto-dialed false 911 calls, a problem which cellular phone manufacturers are working to address in a new update to be downloaded to phones throughout June.
The call load from January to May of this year totalled 977,969 compared to 807,604 calls for the same period last year.
E-Comm did not provide data on which communities are producing more or fewer calls, but Furey said it is estimated that 20 per cent are “made by accident.”
“Our call takers are trained to treat every 911 call as an emergency until they can confidently determine otherwise,” she said.
“When someone calls us by accident, or calls 911 with a non-urgent question or complaint, we must confirm that they are safe and move on to answering the next call from someone waiting for emergency help.”
E-Comm’s target is to answer 95 per cent of 911 calls in five seconds or less.
“Our calls stats show that we exceeded this service level target in 2022 at 98 per cent, and we are continuing to surpass this target at 98 per cent so far in 2023,” Furey said.
Abandoned non-emergency calls
But abandoned calls to non-emergency police lines, which has been an ongoing frustration for the Vancouver Police Department, continue to be an issue, although they are not at the volumes they were in recent years.
A Vancouver police report to the Vancouver Police Board in April said 7,480 non-emergency calls in the first quarter of the year were abandoned by E-Comm, which takes calls on behalf of the department.
The call load was down 60 per cent from the same quarter in 2022, when 18,680 were abandoned, according to the report, which said “while this is an improvement, there is still a significant amount of abandoned calls.”
Asked what E-Comm is doing to reduce the number of abandoned calls, Furey said a new team of 22 call takers is now dedicated to answering police non-emergency calls only. She said that addition has helped free up more call takers responding to 911 calls.
“E-Comm also recently started a pilot of a new digital assistant on the Vancouver police non-emergency line,” she said.
“To date, the technology has successfully deflected approximately a quarter of calls that did not belong on the non-emergency line, allowing call takers to focus on genuine police matters.”
