In an interview, Murray-Bates confirmed her team had received support from those three offices, but didn't specify what kind of support. Kerry Murray-Bates, the manager of communication services for Toronto police, says, on average, the service is doing 'pretty good' with its wait times. The email also says the Toronto police chief's office, the police board chair, and the police union have all given "incredible attention" to the staffing issues and Murray-Bates is confident concerns will be addressed. "My goal is that we get to a place where every phone position is filled and we are reaching our service levels, that members are not frazzled, anxious and angry," Murray-Bates wrote. In an October 2021 email, she acknowledges "that staffing continues to be a struggle," but says she is optimistic the situation will improve soon when new recruits finish their training. "That creates a spike in our call volume, which then creates some impact to our wait times." 'We need to thrive, not just survive'īut emails to staff from Murray-Bates about improving service and staffing reveal some concerns. "One impactful accident on the Gardiner Expressway can generate 50 calls," she said. When it comes to longest wait times - like that 10-minute wait in October - Murray-Bates said the metric reflects "a moment in time" and changes quickly. 3, at 7 p.m., when someone waited for 10 minutes and two seconds for one of nine operators to pick up the call. The longest wait time recorded in those months was on Sunday, Oct. Internal service reports also show monthly average longest wait times ranged from nearly four minutes to nearly five minutes for June through November of last year. The operator captured 140 queue board images where the longest wait time was over two minutes in length, 43 where it was over three minutes and 13 where it was over four minutes long - all over different days of the week and times of the day. The longest wait time among the queue board photos shared with CBC News was six minutes and 51 seconds, with 62 people waiting on hold and nine operators taking calls. Since June 2021, the 911 operator captured nearly 250 snapshots of 911 wait times from 45 different days on the job. 30, 2021, shows a longest wait time of six minutes and 51 seconds, with 62 callers waiting on hold and nine operators working to answer calls. This 911 emergency-call queue board photo from Oct. The team uses historical data to best "match our workforce to our workflow," she said, and continues to train and recruit new staff to fill vacancies. By comparison, in the same time period a day earlier, the call centre received 400 calls, said Murray-Bates. The communication centre received just under 900 emergency calls in the roughly two hours around the April 2018 Toronto van attack, which killed 10 people and injured 16 others. "Financially or logistically, it's just not possible to staff a van attack every day. "There's always going to be those peaks in call volume that create wait time - it's inevitable," said Kerry Murray-Bates. The manager of Toronto's 911 communication centre told CBC News the service is safe and fulfilling its duty to the public despite any staffing challenges. "We all took this job to help people, we all took this job to answer your call, to be there - and we can't do it." Peaks in call volume create wait time: manager "We're not fulfilling our duty to the public," said the 911 operator. The staffing issues mean there are sometimes fewer than 10 operators answering 911 calls for a city of nearly three million people, leading to average longest wait times ranging from two to 10 minutes. Reports, emails and snapshots of Toronto's 911 call queue paint a picture of an emergency service struggling to retain staff amid burnout-fuelled shortages. Now internal documents obtained by CBC News show how long wait times are more than one-offs in Canada's largest city. Two years before the pandemic, Toronto police were working to address wait times by hiring and training more operators to meet increased demand for 911. "People are being hurt, and they don't know they're not getting the help that they need."ĬBC News is not identifying the 911 operator because they're not authorized to talk about their work at the Toronto Police Service's 911 communication centre, which answers all emergency calls for the city.Ĭallers being put on hold when trying to report an emergency was a problem even before COVID-19. "Everything that we do at our job as call-takers is about seconds," the operator said. Those are all examples of emergencies where callers waited on hold for longer than two minutes before a Toronto 911 operator said they were able to answer the call. A baby not breathing, a drowning and a person suffering from a gunshot wound.
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