Police, city work to divert some 911 calls to 311
Work is on to divert some 911 calls to 311, including complaints about noise, animals and rude restaurant patrons. Citizens sometimes call the emergency number with non-urgent problems.

thestar.com
By BETSY POWELL
Aug. 25, 2017

David Letterman might have called them the Top 10 dumbest reasons Torontonians called 911.

There’s a snake in my toilet.

How long is my hydro going to be out?

Someone shoveled their snow onto my driveway.

I live above a bar and it’s too loud.

There is a big centipede in my bathroom.

How long do I cook my turkey for?

The food in my nursing home is bad.

A restaurant patron failed to flush the toilet.

It’s midnight on Christmas Eve and there’s a suspicious gathering at a church.

The building next door collapsed and now the construction noise is too loud.

Last year, operators in the Toronto Police Service’s Communications Centre received 1.8 million calls of all kinds, including many that had no business being placed to 911.

The emergency line is intended for “situations where the safety of people or property are at risk,” either because of fire, crime in progress or urgent medical issue.

But thousands of Toronto residents also routinely call 911 with valid concerns and issues that could have been diverted, “to the more appropriate 3-1-1 non-emergency number,” according to an internal TPS report submitted the Toronto Police Services Board this past week.

As part of a major plan to modernize the service, make more efficient and effective use of police resources, and try to contain the billion-dollar-budget, the Police Services and the city have joined forces to steer those non-policing calls to other city departments and service-providers.

A review of a two-year sample of 56,000 non-emergency calls to 911 found roughly 9,000 could have been diverted to 311 for follow-up with various city departments, the report said.

The calls fell into the following categories: noisy party, noise complaints, animal complaints, traffic obstructions, traffic signals, disputes, landlord and tenant issues and damage.

The police and city are ramping up a public education campaign to drive the message home that the 311 service, not 911, is the place to call for non-emergency problems, such as a broken water main.

Launched in 2009, 311 is a catch-all number for city information and services.

City 311 and police 911 operators are, for the first time, staffing a booth together at the CNE “to get people to know the difference between 311 and 911, and the types of calls that you should be calling 311 for versus 911,” Toronto Police Acting Insp. Greg Watts said Friday.

“The expectation of 911 is you call, we come, and we come fairly quickly,” Watts said. Expectations have to change; it might take a bylaw officer a few days to respond.

Gary Yorke, the director who oversees 311, says, already 911 operators transfer calls to 311, “but it’s not consistent and that’s the issue.”

So, for months, police and city officials have been developing protocols to determine what a police matter is and what is more suitable for the 311 line.

“Depending on who you talk to, you get different answers, and that’s an issue; there should be one answer. We’re working for clarity on that,” Yorke says.

Some examples are no brainers.

Downtown Toronto residents fed up with construction noise around the York/Bay Gardiner Expressway off ramp earlier this summer called in their fury to 911.

“Certainly not a police matter,” says Yorke.

But others aren’t so clear cut, such as a noise complaint about a nightclub. “When you’re going to deal with that issue, other issues might arise . . . so, really, maybe the police are a better fit to manage that,” he says.

Watts, of the Toronto Police, says 911 communications operators will need to “follow a process map.”

They will be trained to ask, “Is there anybody in danger? Is there any major public safety risk right now, and, if there is, then that’s our job . . . if there isn’t, is there a better agency that can handle that other than the police?” Watts says.

Yorke has already hired 30 additional part time staff to handle the “influx,” although 9,000 calls, on top of the 1.5 million that 311 already processes, and spread over the course of a year, in an operation that runs around the clock, is “not that much.”

The number of online requests coming through on the city’s website is also increasing every year, and this is easing some of the pressure on 311 operators, he adds.

Yorke says he’s confident he can manage the change within the existing budget. “If there is a cost impact, then we look at corporate funding if required,” he adds.

Other city departments will also have to beef up staff. Municipal Licensing and Standards division has hired 26 additional bylaw enforcement officers, although some of those positions amounted to filling vacancies, Yorke says.

He notes that Toronto police started pushing noise complaints to 311 in 2015 and customer service representatives, or “CSRs,” as Yorke calls them, already receive extra training in how to deal with calls from people considering suicide.

It’s part of 311’s “evolution” and “it’s the right thing to do.”