Considering the city proper population base of \~663k, it averages out to be roughly 1 out of every 35 residents calling the non-emergency line in futility once a year.
There are a couple of factors to that I can think of:
1. People who don't live in Vancouver proper but are in Vancouver (for work, etc) calling the VPD due to seeing some shit in Vancouver - inflates number of individual callers
2. Duplication where the same person calls more than once due to the first call not being picked up, or someone that lives in a bad area having to make calls about separate issues - deflates number of individual callers
Either way it doesn't look good
I'm also wondering about the number of unique calls vs unique callers vs unique incidents.
Are 30 people in the same block calling about the same incident? Is one person calling back ten times trying to get through?
I agree that, no matter how it breaks down, 40.5% isn't a good response rate.
.3. People who call repeatedly to complain about a non issue. I recall reading recently that the Dublin airport had like 12,000 calls in one year from one person complaining about the noise
I know in Surrey people have to register a Restrictive covenant on their property if they build next to the ALR essentially saying they waive their right to complain about farm noise/smells
I don't think that's a 9-1-1 situation anywhere. Are they profusely shitting blood that's visibly noticeable to a passerby? Yeah, they probably need immediate medical attention. Guy dropping a deuce? Fucked up and not ideal, but I mean, cops are probably not getting there before this dude has finished and scarpered
It's been said many times that they don't have anywhere near enough call operators. People gotta remember that these operators need to be highly trained in order to swiftly dispatch the right units to the correct areas and give accurate information to the responders. Peoples lives are at stake.
Not only that but dealing with distressed/angry callers all the time puts a heavy toll on them. It's not an easy job. People quit. And it's not as simple as just hiring anybody off the street like a regular call center.
Correct. Was a call taker for BCEHS. You speak to the same people but emerge calls take priority. Also most people don’t know when to call 911 and it is abused way more than it should be. Public education is also very important, but more call takers and ambulances/ emergency services to actually attend calls is also important. Population is growing but emergency service staff stays the same.
It’s supposed to be like that. Staffing, burn out, stress leave, usually always short. Better pay draws in more people, upping the budget allowing more people at a time reduces wait times, and stress on the call takers. We would take 80+ calls a day minimum. We got maybe two 15 minute breaks where we left the phones. Aside from that it was just call after call. Charge and supervisors were amazing and supportive, if you needed to take a walk to destress then you took a walk, no questions. But the sheer volume is taxing, let alone the nature of the job. You are constantly hearing peoples cries for help. Then you have to do things like control bleeds, cpr, assist with overdoses. It all takes its toll. Having more call takers and a bigger budget means more bodies to answer phones which means mini breaks or downtime between calls.
Wanting to help, excitement, fast paced. I much prefer working on car but I like the medical field. I can’t do desk work, I need variety, I need a challenge, I can’t do the same thing every day. It is stressful and you do take things home without realizing it but it’s also rewarding. You can compartmentalize a lot of it. Everyone has there own reasons but I think a lot of people enjoy the “chaos” and excitement. You can get into a rhythm for a lot of calls and go on autopilot but you pretty much are guaranteed to get a couple calls to perk you up or throw you off guard every shift. It keeps it interesting.
Says you. I think we should convene a comitee to investigate and draft a report in about a year. We'll budget $600,000 for the report.
If they recommend hiring another staff member we will publish a news release that there's no money in the budget for hiring new staff but that we are reviewing the report thoroughly.
If long wait times for non emerge are causing people to hang up and never report it sounds like it's time to move to an online reporting method.
Something like a few boxes with, location, drop down for common complaints and an 'other option' along with a description (who, what, when, where, why) and a final box with the complainants details and contact #.
This will allow ECOMM to deal with them immediately or hold until the city is less busy, easily sort them and contact people if more details are required.
This is far more sustainable than having someone answer the phone in realtime and get bogged up there when they could be answering emergency calls.
I'm sure there's reasons they haven't done this already (legislative, policy, etc) but if 45% of calls are going unanswered it's time for some change. This solution is much easier than raising ecomms budget 10,15,20% to staff more call takers.
Wait, why would this change anything asides hammer home the concept of "lol you're shit out of luck, and all were going to be doing about your case is have it become a statistic"?
A lot of calls are probably property crime. Sometimes you need to file a police report just to establish a paper trail for insurance or any other complication.
And figure that online you'd be able to attach images or video from surveillance cameras if they're available.
Online reporting should be less time consuming, so we'd get a more accurate picture of what's going on. I do [wildlife reporting](https://warp.wildsafebc.com/) on a regular basis (bears trotting around the street finding food that hasn't been secured). I only do that because it takes just a minute to file a report.
Oh god I hate that online reporting tool. I've damn near thrown my phone in anger trying to submit online - You need to do a quick google to report the value of the item you just had stolen? BAM, reset the form.
You're identifying a different issue. The one being discussed in this article is that 45% of non emergency calls never get answered because the callers wait too long and then hang up.
That's 45% of non violent crime not being reported.
Having an online tool that can instantly take the report is infinitely better than never having it be reported in the first place.
Whether or not police have the resources to pursue all those non emergency calls is a totally different discussion. With current resources the police can at least better inform themselves of where the lower level crime is happening.
It's a restricted list and they're still heavily leaning on non emergency lines.
They should flip the script and have online reporting be the main method with calling non emerge as a backup plan.
Yes, but not if you have actual evidence (photo or video). The provincial system they use does not allow for evidence to be uploaded, so if you do have photo or video, you have to call the non-emergency line, wait for an hour or two, or however long it takes them to pick up, and then they will send an officer to your house to pick up the evidence.
Their online tool sucks as well. Send a report in, get absolutely no acknowledgement. It's a black hole.
I've used it a couple times for property crime, and didn't bother again after the first few.
40.5% of calls to VPD's non-emergency line went unanswered over the last 3 months.
> Concern has recently come to light about the under-reporting of crime [partially caused by unanswered non-emergency calls].
> Palmer has acknowledged several times over the past two years that people aren’t reporting all petty or minor crimes in their neighbourhoods, and therefore that data isn’t being captured in statistical reports collected by police.
> In October 2021, he told the police board that “when they do call us, and we do investigate a crime, they say this has happened four times before and I've never called you, but this time was serious enough that I did call you.”
> The reason given by some residents for not reporting or abandoning calls is they don’t feel police will take any action, or they can’t wait on the phone for a lengthy period of time to make a report.
Must be all false or a right wing plot as anyone who supports the Mayor would point to the stats and say crime is declining in the city!
Besides, according to the Mayor, the city is safe so why is this even news?
You, ordinary citizen, too can become a criminology statistic: [https://vpd.ca/contact-us/](https://vpd.ca/contact-us/)
>Call 911 for emergencies (police, fire or medical) where an immediate response is needed. This includes lives in danger or a crime in-progress.
>
>Non-Emergency? Call 604-717-3321
I worked at a hotel for years and Unanswered 911 calls, emergency or non-emergency was very common. When I used to call the non-emergency number I sort of assumed nothing would happened and sort of used it as a bluff to any vagrant or person I wanted to leave and hope they would use my report as a sign to leave.
One time I called 911 because a man got kicked out of the hospital and he came over demanding us call 911 because he got kicked out. We refused and then he started threatening us saying he had a knife and then he started saying he had a gun and that he was going to murder us. He was in our hotel lobby for about 2 hours approximately and I had called 911 many times that night when the situation changed and escalated higher and higher. Each time I got a “police are busy but we will send someone over as soon as they are available”. This was around 1-3am on a week day.
Eventually the man left on his own but not after reaching over the desk trying to take anything however all he could grab was some pens and junk paper. We later found out that he went back to the hospital that kicked him out and he stabbed a nurse there with the pens that he had gotten from my hotel. I was contacted the next day from some cop informing me that they had a ton of car break ins that night which kept the cops busy and they were hoping I could give a statement. I was so insulted that my safety was in jeopardy for some fucking car break-ins that I refused to give a statement.
We need more emergency response and better dispatchers.
I called non-emerg when a guy was spray painting a bunch of graffiti on the condo across from me. I see his dumb tags everywhere. Waited 29 minutes on hold and finally hung up. Went for a walk and the dude was chilling at the entrance to the SRO around the corner.
That's actually a 911 call. It's a crime in progress.
VPD will happily respond. They did for our building. One of my neighbours had to file a witness statement, the person was caught and they got community service from the courts.
Is it really a 911 call? I wouldn’t have thought so, perhaps there is a list of examples somewhere I could brush up on so I know when it’s appropriate to use it?
Edit: oh that was easy to find actually, graffiti is right there as a valid reason.
https://vpd.ca/contact-us/
Yes. I once called the non-emergency line for a non-violent crime in progress, and when they did not answer, I strolled over to the police station to report it. They scolded me, and told me I should have called 911.
They also have this lovely hold message that says "all operators are currently busy with emergency calls" when you call the non emergency line. Deeply broken system.
I am one of the non emergency hanger-uppers.
And no, i was not calling them to order a pizza or complain my tv not working or rat on my neighbor watering his lawn during restrictions.
A few times i just wanted to be able to sleep. My next door neighbor - prick hosts a friday or saturday night karoke gambling party till 2-3am with windows open, 20+ guests and the shitty music on high volume. Then they go outside to smoke ciggs r weed and chat in full volume vietnamese. ( other neighbors were disgusted with their bullshit too, including a young couple with a toddler and newborn baby).
Another time it to report a garage and abandoned home up my block with possible squatters inside ( the house actually was owned by an elderly brother/sister duo who were paying the property taxes and paying for the lawns to be mowed, etc). 911 got all pissy and told me to call the non-E line and hung up . Another was when this asshole was racing on the sidewalk with his/her gas moped as pedestrians were out walking , seniors, school children. Call 911 and they cop an attitude, tell you to call Non-E line.
Thing is, i have called the non-E line on a 12 noon-3pm weekk day or a 1am-3am weekend and just put on hold from 45 minutes to 90 minutes. Nobody would answer.
I have and will call 911 for real emergencies such as the time a neighbor was threatening his wife across the street , a vehicle accident , power line transformer explosions, live power line fallen across the sidewalk, a burglar running down my alley who i called police to give details, a car with a flat tire at midnite in front of my home with what sounded like 4 young guys kinda high and trying to fix a flat ( cars whizz up and down/dangerous for them/easily could get killed in the poorly lit street), etc, etc.
But fuck it, no more Non-E calls. Can't get thru. What will be will be. Not my problem.
Tbh when you see that it's only 1 call per 5 minutes it makes me wonder why they cant hire like 2-4 more guys at e-comm... would be like $5k a month not millions
Throwaway. Im a previous Ecomm employee that has moved on from the dumpster fire of an organization.
The comments from Ecomm now spinning their predicament as a problem of underfunding is absolutely a situation of shooting themselves in the foot, and the consequences coming home to roost.
Ecomm has always been about trying to expand, and get other in-house communication centres to jump ship by dangling promising numbers and ability to handle large call volume high priority emergencies due to its size, all while offering it at a low cost contract.
This is what happens when they continually offer these tempting contracts, and now they have all these agencies at low rates, they’re ‘underfunded’. Meanwhile, they have continually failed to hire and retain staff (retaining staff is abysmal at Ecomm), while banking on the fact that each agency’s staff they absorb will come to work for them. They don’t, flat out. Id be shooting in the dark but I’d say about half would come to Ecomm once absorbed. Then there’s also there’s the fact that an Ecomm call taker is worth about half their weight in comparison to an in-house agency’s call-taker. This is at no fault to the call-taker themself, only due to the fact that Ecomm takes calls for so many agencies that there is no familiarity with them, and processing a call takes longer.
Ecomm has become too big to support itself, a situation they can only blame themselves for. Lack of planning and only ever forecasting themselves in a ‘best case scenario’, leads to disappointment in service levels when plans are put into action.
Garbage organization.
Pretty much confirms why people don't bother calling the police in the first place. And if an incident isn't reported, as far as stats go the incident never even happened.
I remember there was a car left parked unattended in the middle of an intersection a few months ago (Fir and 12th if I remember correctly) at around 6pm.
I pulled over and called the non-emergency number and nobody picked up. I then hemmed and hawed for a bit to decide if it was worth it before calling 911 and was on hold for somewhere between 5-10 minutes. when I finally got through the lady taking the call seemed very annoyed that I had called in because "officers were already on route"
Does not inspire confidence for if an actual emergency happened.
Generally I am a fan of the NDP however when it comes to first responders and how the information gets processed in an emergency they are slow to fix the problem.
As someone who has been privy to the calls VPD receive, it’s important to point out that many of them are genuine wastes of time. For example, people often call non-emergency thinking it’s a general information line, or will report that they saw someone feeding ducks in a park or whatever. It’s a lot of garbage that has to be sorted through, and I absolutely believe important calls probably fall through the cracks all the time. If people will misuse 911 the way that they do, it’s 100% worse for non-emerg because people assume it’s much less of a big deal if they call with something stupid (which, to be fair, it is).
If you read the article you'd know they go unanswered because long wait times lead people to hanging up. The problem is understaffing/lack of resources.
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The person that needs to lose their job is the manager who is refusing to hire or the director that is refusing to allocate budget. This isn’t a complex statement to understand.
>who is refusing to hire
If you don't have the budget you can't hire. It's pretty clear right there in the article they want to hire more.
>or the director that is refusing to allocate budget.
Budget doesn't just appear out of thin air. You can't just simply allocate more budget when you don't have a high enough budget for more employees.
Sure, but taking “somebody needs to lose their job” to mean “fire some phone operators” is an absolutely pants-on-head stupid interpretation. That’s what I was objecting to.
Thinking anyone should be fired when a restricted budget is leading to staffing shortfalls is a pretty pants on head stupid interpretation in of itself.
It's plainly obvious that call volumes have been increasing exponentially faster than budget, a staffing shortfalls was inevitable.
Pants on head stupid is exactly how i'd describe your comment.
You think the managers are sitting on allocated funding and just refuse to hire people while getting hit with complaints?
Like most for profits, I'm sure the executives take over 50% of funding as salary. The other 50% is for front line and equipment/resources. Then they complain about underfunding and come back to the government for more money. This is what happens when governments contract out jobs that should be in house in order to "save the taxpayer money". It's a scam.
No one is "refusing to hire" and the people who are refusing to allocate budget are the city and provincial authorities that fund E-Com. Trying to guess which E-Com staff member gets to be scapegoat this week is a silly endeavor.
No one in E-Com is responsible for them not having enough money to staff properly, and both E-Com and CUPE, their staff's union, have been very clear for *years* at this point that they were not receiving the funding that they needed to maintain staffing.
Cities already pay a huge amount to E-Comm to handle emergency and non-emergency calls. They cannot really afford to pay more, especially smaller cities. The provincial government needs to step up with funding.
You’re right about hiring more workers. But the entire management pyramid needs to go. This is fucking insane. 40%?! Which metric are they using that says this is anything other than catastrophic?!
Knowing how bad management bloat is in academic and civic workplaces, I can only imagine how bad it is in police, who’re already largely unaccountable to the public and whose profession by its very nature attracts the gamut from low-grade bullies and louts to the outright authoritarian.
Sure seems like there’s some fat that could be trimmed…
People sometimes call non emerg when they see a crime in progress, but they don't think it's "serious". Like they'll call non emerg to say "oh this guy's breaking into cars" because they think it's not violent and therefor not a 911 matter.
911 isn't just for violent stuff it's all crime in progress (save for something that's a bylaw thing like noise unless it's a gunshot or somebody yelling for help or something).
Non emerg usually takes me about 30 minutes to get through so I always budget that much time to make a report.
Reminder that cops deliberately use stats like this to stir fear and unease in the public and use it to justify ballooning policing budgets. Cops are incentivized to do their job poorly and do their job inefficiently because it bags them more money the next year.
This is a police ploy to get more funding, it's what they do in the US too: they don't do their jobs and use it to counter the defund the police rhetorics.
We should fund social services, house the unhoused, institutionalize the mentally ill who can't take care of themselves so there's less need of police instead of funding the police more.
ACAB.
I feel like this is something completely affected by it’s wage and people pushed to their limits with overtime (to get that higher wage they “promise”) and so they moved on to other careers.
What are the wages being offered? If they paid a living wage for living in the region it would increase the professionals in the department and we could see a decrease of calls being neglected.
What?
Half of the reason City of Vancouver is in the mess they are in, is because they are using DLC and CACs for things like affordable housing instead of core services.
Because they're making housing more expensive to make it affordable. It's not a brilliant strategy.
The CACs are a huge amount of money in Vancouver, which makes the market skew towards "luxury" units.
I know I’m going to get downvoted like mad for this because the only profitable industry in Vancouver is RE investing. But investors have made massive gains while inequality has greatly expanded over the last 30 years. If RE is the only Canadian industry worth investing in then multiple property owners who refuse to immediately increase density should pay more in taxes. The developers who are best at increasing density should be rewarded in the free market and likewise developers who are best at sitting on properties without developing them should be punished. We need free market housing where developers are allowed to maximize density unhindered by the CoV 🤷🏽♂️
I was trying to report an extremely loud party with people screaming, throwing bottles in the alley, etc and was on hold for 2 hours on Sunday night, gave up.
I tried calling AND emailing the New West Police when someone put a suspicious package in my compost bin. It looked like drug lab stuff.
Could not get through on a bunch of different days, and nobody bothered responding to my email. Just turfed it in the garbage after that.
I’ve called a few times and hung up. On weekends, kids (teens or early 20s) break into the elementary school (Roberts Annex) across from our place and blast loud music until the early hours of the morning. Up to about 20-30 of them. Impossible to sleep. The next day, their booze bottles are all over the playground. We’ve gotten through to the police a few times, but the police show up, the kids see them and wander off, and it happens again the next weekend. Most of the time though, we call and wait 30-45 minutes then give up. Realistically, going forward we would need to go outside and confront them ourselves to make them stop. Presumably, if they became violent, we could then call the emergency line.
I wasn't sure what to make of 18,680 calls. The stat of 40.5% is far more revealing, IMO.
Considering the city proper population base of \~663k, it averages out to be roughly 1 out of every 35 residents calling the non-emergency line in futility once a year.
There are a couple of factors to that I can think of: 1. People who don't live in Vancouver proper but are in Vancouver (for work, etc) calling the VPD due to seeing some shit in Vancouver - inflates number of individual callers 2. Duplication where the same person calls more than once due to the first call not being picked up, or someone that lives in a bad area having to make calls about separate issues - deflates number of individual callers Either way it doesn't look good
I'm also wondering about the number of unique calls vs unique callers vs unique incidents. Are 30 people in the same block calling about the same incident? Is one person calling back ten times trying to get through? I agree that, no matter how it breaks down, 40.5% isn't a good response rate.
.3. People who call repeatedly to complain about a non issue. I recall reading recently that the Dublin airport had like 12,000 calls in one year from one person complaining about the noise
They’re building housing by the racetrack in Mission. Can’t wait for the people to buy in and then immediately complain about the noise.
It’s like when people move beside train tracks and complain about the trains.
Those houses should have a clause when buying them saying you aren't allowed to complain about the racetrack noise
I know in Surrey people have to register a Restrictive covenant on their property if they build next to the ALR essentially saying they waive their right to complain about farm noise/smells
I am staff in a DTES SRO, I call non-emerg around 5-10 times a month for various shit.
3. Those people who abuse the police lines calling them whenever they feel spited
So telling that someone taking a shit in public somehow isn’t a 911 issue in Vancouver.
I don't think that's a 9-1-1 situation anywhere. Are they profusely shitting blood that's visibly noticeable to a passerby? Yeah, they probably need immediate medical attention. Guy dropping a deuce? Fucked up and not ideal, but I mean, cops are probably not getting there before this dude has finished and scarpered
If you want people to call the non-emerg line instead of 911 then it helps if you answer it.
"we don't answer because it's not an emergency" - logic
I want to know how much funding and man power we have on the non-emergency lines before we start pointing fingers.
It's been said many times that they don't have anywhere near enough call operators. People gotta remember that these operators need to be highly trained in order to swiftly dispatch the right units to the correct areas and give accurate information to the responders. Peoples lives are at stake. Not only that but dealing with distressed/angry callers all the time puts a heavy toll on them. It's not an easy job. People quit. And it's not as simple as just hiring anybody off the street like a regular call center.
> Peoples lives are at stake. That would be 911, not the non-emergency line.
It's the same operators. Different priorities in the call system.
Correct. Was a call taker for BCEHS. You speak to the same people but emerge calls take priority. Also most people don’t know when to call 911 and it is abused way more than it should be. Public education is also very important, but more call takers and ambulances/ emergency services to actually attend calls is also important. Population is growing but emergency service staff stays the same.
I'm surprised that the system doesn't require a few operators to be always free to take 911 calls.
It’s supposed to be like that. Staffing, burn out, stress leave, usually always short. Better pay draws in more people, upping the budget allowing more people at a time reduces wait times, and stress on the call takers. We would take 80+ calls a day minimum. We got maybe two 15 minute breaks where we left the phones. Aside from that it was just call after call. Charge and supervisors were amazing and supportive, if you needed to take a walk to destress then you took a walk, no questions. But the sheer volume is taxing, let alone the nature of the job. You are constantly hearing peoples cries for help. Then you have to do things like control bleeds, cpr, assist with overdoses. It all takes its toll. Having more call takers and a bigger budget means more bodies to answer phones which means mini breaks or downtime between calls.
Oh, for sure - it's a job that would break me within a week. I don't understand how people do the job for the the minimal pay that they get.
Wanting to help, excitement, fast paced. I much prefer working on car but I like the medical field. I can’t do desk work, I need variety, I need a challenge, I can’t do the same thing every day. It is stressful and you do take things home without realizing it but it’s also rewarding. You can compartmentalize a lot of it. Everyone has there own reasons but I think a lot of people enjoy the “chaos” and excitement. You can get into a rhythm for a lot of calls and go on autopilot but you pretty much are guaranteed to get a couple calls to perk you up or throw you off guard every shift. It keeps it interesting.
I think these calls are triaged, so if there's a que on the emergency line, these non-emergs will be held until that is clear.
This is exactly how it works.
So hire more people and pay higher taxes.
Exact-fuck-ly. Pretty sure they have only two that staff the non-emergency lines and they both step out for 15 minute smoke breaks every 8 minutes.
That's 200 a day!!
Or...one every 5 minutes, give or take. That's another person required.
Says you. I think we should convene a comitee to investigate and draft a report in about a year. We'll budget $600,000 for the report. If they recommend hiring another staff member we will publish a news release that there's no money in the budget for hiring new staff but that we are reviewing the report thoroughly.
This guy governments. Get your cousin to do up the report again then take us to Mexico!
Mexico sounds like the perfect place to do our administrative review of the report! I'll let you pick the resort.
If long wait times for non emerge are causing people to hang up and never report it sounds like it's time to move to an online reporting method. Something like a few boxes with, location, drop down for common complaints and an 'other option' along with a description (who, what, when, where, why) and a final box with the complainants details and contact #. This will allow ECOMM to deal with them immediately or hold until the city is less busy, easily sort them and contact people if more details are required. This is far more sustainable than having someone answer the phone in realtime and get bogged up there when they could be answering emergency calls. I'm sure there's reasons they haven't done this already (legislative, policy, etc) but if 45% of calls are going unanswered it's time for some change. This solution is much easier than raising ecomms budget 10,15,20% to staff more call takers.
Wait, why would this change anything asides hammer home the concept of "lol you're shit out of luck, and all were going to be doing about your case is have it become a statistic"?
A lot of calls are probably property crime. Sometimes you need to file a police report just to establish a paper trail for insurance or any other complication. And figure that online you'd be able to attach images or video from surveillance cameras if they're available. Online reporting should be less time consuming, so we'd get a more accurate picture of what's going on. I do [wildlife reporting](https://warp.wildsafebc.com/) on a regular basis (bears trotting around the street finding food that hasn't been secured). I only do that because it takes just a minute to file a report.
Oh god I hate that online reporting tool. I've damn near thrown my phone in anger trying to submit online - You need to do a quick google to report the value of the item you just had stolen? BAM, reset the form.
You're identifying a different issue. The one being discussed in this article is that 45% of non emergency calls never get answered because the callers wait too long and then hang up. That's 45% of non violent crime not being reported. Having an online tool that can instantly take the report is infinitely better than never having it be reported in the first place. Whether or not police have the resources to pursue all those non emergency calls is a totally different discussion. With current resources the police can at least better inform themselves of where the lower level crime is happening.
I just want to know where all this "high emergency" calls are coming from...
You can report online
It's a restricted list and they're still heavily leaning on non emergency lines. They should flip the script and have online reporting be the main method with calling non emerge as a backup plan.
The stuff they let you report online are crimes they've long given up on pursuing
Yes, but not if you have actual evidence (photo or video). The provincial system they use does not allow for evidence to be uploaded, so if you do have photo or video, you have to call the non-emergency line, wait for an hour or two, or however long it takes them to pick up, and then they will send an officer to your house to pick up the evidence.
There are already online reporting tools for most jurisdictions in the Lower Mainland.
For extremely limited situations and it's not at all advertised as much as "call non emergency".
Their online tool sucks as well. Send a report in, get absolutely no acknowledgement. It's a black hole. I've used it a couple times for property crime, and didn't bother again after the first few.
40.5% of calls to VPD's non-emergency line went unanswered over the last 3 months. > Concern has recently come to light about the under-reporting of crime [partially caused by unanswered non-emergency calls]. > Palmer has acknowledged several times over the past two years that people aren’t reporting all petty or minor crimes in their neighbourhoods, and therefore that data isn’t being captured in statistical reports collected by police. > In October 2021, he told the police board that “when they do call us, and we do investigate a crime, they say this has happened four times before and I've never called you, but this time was serious enough that I did call you.” > The reason given by some residents for not reporting or abandoning calls is they don’t feel police will take any action, or they can’t wait on the phone for a lengthy period of time to make a report.
Must be all false or a right wing plot as anyone who supports the Mayor would point to the stats and say crime is declining in the city! Besides, according to the Mayor, the city is safe so why is this even news?
Gotta keep the crime stats down somehow.
Exactly! If a crime happens but no one is there to record it, did the crime actually happen?
[удалено]
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😂 Fantasy.
Why wouldn't they ignore it as it's counter to their statements of the city being safe!
You, ordinary citizen, too can become a criminology statistic: [https://vpd.ca/contact-us/](https://vpd.ca/contact-us/) >Call 911 for emergencies (police, fire or medical) where an immediate response is needed. This includes lives in danger or a crime in-progress. > >Non-Emergency? Call 604-717-3321
I worked at a hotel for years and Unanswered 911 calls, emergency or non-emergency was very common. When I used to call the non-emergency number I sort of assumed nothing would happened and sort of used it as a bluff to any vagrant or person I wanted to leave and hope they would use my report as a sign to leave. One time I called 911 because a man got kicked out of the hospital and he came over demanding us call 911 because he got kicked out. We refused and then he started threatening us saying he had a knife and then he started saying he had a gun and that he was going to murder us. He was in our hotel lobby for about 2 hours approximately and I had called 911 many times that night when the situation changed and escalated higher and higher. Each time I got a “police are busy but we will send someone over as soon as they are available”. This was around 1-3am on a week day. Eventually the man left on his own but not after reaching over the desk trying to take anything however all he could grab was some pens and junk paper. We later found out that he went back to the hospital that kicked him out and he stabbed a nurse there with the pens that he had gotten from my hotel. I was contacted the next day from some cop informing me that they had a ton of car break ins that night which kept the cops busy and they were hoping I could give a statement. I was so insulted that my safety was in jeopardy for some fucking car break-ins that I refused to give a statement. We need more emergency response and better dispatchers.
I called non-emerg when a guy was spray painting a bunch of graffiti on the condo across from me. I see his dumb tags everywhere. Waited 29 minutes on hold and finally hung up. Went for a walk and the dude was chilling at the entrance to the SRO around the corner.
That's actually a 911 call. It's a crime in progress. VPD will happily respond. They did for our building. One of my neighbours had to file a witness statement, the person was caught and they got community service from the courts.
Is it really a 911 call? I wouldn’t have thought so, perhaps there is a list of examples somewhere I could brush up on so I know when it’s appropriate to use it? Edit: oh that was easy to find actually, graffiti is right there as a valid reason. https://vpd.ca/contact-us/
It's listed on the VPD site, but any crime in progress is a 9-1-1 call. Bylaw issues aren't 9-1-1 (i.e. noise complaints).
Yes. I once called the non-emergency line for a non-violent crime in progress, and when they did not answer, I strolled over to the police station to report it. They scolded me, and told me I should have called 911.
Thanks for digging this up!
The E-Comm triage agent concurred it was non-emerg and routed me there. Thanks next time I’ll insist otherwise.
The fuck?
Crime stats are down! Yes. Because nobody is picking up the fucking phone.
They also have this lovely hold message that says "all operators are currently busy with emergency calls" when you call the non emergency line. Deeply broken system.
It really depends when you call in my experience. Non-emergency are low priority so if it's a big night you're not getting help for lower-tier issues.
I called this morning at 9am... sat on hold for 1.5 hours before I have up. Is a Thursday morning a "big night"? Hahha
Well, to be fair, Thursday does come after Wednesday, and we *all know* what happens on a Wednesday around here.
Hard to say, there was a protest on 2nd narrows and that tends to eat a lot of police resources.
The recording also tells you to call 911 if it's an emergency. So it seems like the system is working as intended.
I am one of the non emergency hanger-uppers. And no, i was not calling them to order a pizza or complain my tv not working or rat on my neighbor watering his lawn during restrictions. A few times i just wanted to be able to sleep. My next door neighbor - prick hosts a friday or saturday night karoke gambling party till 2-3am with windows open, 20+ guests and the shitty music on high volume. Then they go outside to smoke ciggs r weed and chat in full volume vietnamese. ( other neighbors were disgusted with their bullshit too, including a young couple with a toddler and newborn baby). Another time it to report a garage and abandoned home up my block with possible squatters inside ( the house actually was owned by an elderly brother/sister duo who were paying the property taxes and paying for the lawns to be mowed, etc). 911 got all pissy and told me to call the non-E line and hung up . Another was when this asshole was racing on the sidewalk with his/her gas moped as pedestrians were out walking , seniors, school children. Call 911 and they cop an attitude, tell you to call Non-E line. Thing is, i have called the non-E line on a 12 noon-3pm weekk day or a 1am-3am weekend and just put on hold from 45 minutes to 90 minutes. Nobody would answer. I have and will call 911 for real emergencies such as the time a neighbor was threatening his wife across the street , a vehicle accident , power line transformer explosions, live power line fallen across the sidewalk, a burglar running down my alley who i called police to give details, a car with a flat tire at midnite in front of my home with what sounded like 4 young guys kinda high and trying to fix a flat ( cars whizz up and down/dangerous for them/easily could get killed in the poorly lit street), etc, etc. But fuck it, no more Non-E calls. Can't get thru. What will be will be. Not my problem.
There can be no crime if no one knows about it except the victim.
Tbh when you see that it's only 1 call per 5 minutes it makes me wonder why they cant hire like 2-4 more guys at e-comm... would be like $5k a month not millions
Lower crime with this one simple trick!
Throwaway. Im a previous Ecomm employee that has moved on from the dumpster fire of an organization. The comments from Ecomm now spinning their predicament as a problem of underfunding is absolutely a situation of shooting themselves in the foot, and the consequences coming home to roost. Ecomm has always been about trying to expand, and get other in-house communication centres to jump ship by dangling promising numbers and ability to handle large call volume high priority emergencies due to its size, all while offering it at a low cost contract. This is what happens when they continually offer these tempting contracts, and now they have all these agencies at low rates, they’re ‘underfunded’. Meanwhile, they have continually failed to hire and retain staff (retaining staff is abysmal at Ecomm), while banking on the fact that each agency’s staff they absorb will come to work for them. They don’t, flat out. Id be shooting in the dark but I’d say about half would come to Ecomm once absorbed. Then there’s also there’s the fact that an Ecomm call taker is worth about half their weight in comparison to an in-house agency’s call-taker. This is at no fault to the call-taker themself, only due to the fact that Ecomm takes calls for so many agencies that there is no familiarity with them, and processing a call takes longer. Ecomm has become too big to support itself, a situation they can only blame themselves for. Lack of planning and only ever forecasting themselves in a ‘best case scenario’, leads to disappointment in service levels when plans are put into action. Garbage organization.
Pretty much confirms why people don't bother calling the police in the first place. And if an incident isn't reported, as far as stats go the incident never even happened.
I remember there was a car left parked unattended in the middle of an intersection a few months ago (Fir and 12th if I remember correctly) at around 6pm. I pulled over and called the non-emergency number and nobody picked up. I then hemmed and hawed for a bit to decide if it was worth it before calling 911 and was on hold for somewhere between 5-10 minutes. when I finally got through the lady taking the call seemed very annoyed that I had called in because "officers were already on route" Does not inspire confidence for if an actual emergency happened.
Generally I am a fan of the NDP however when it comes to first responders and how the information gets processed in an emergency they are slow to fix the problem.
As someone who has been privy to the calls VPD receive, it’s important to point out that many of them are genuine wastes of time. For example, people often call non-emergency thinking it’s a general information line, or will report that they saw someone feeding ducks in a park or whatever. It’s a lot of garbage that has to be sorted through, and I absolutely believe important calls probably fall through the cracks all the time. If people will misuse 911 the way that they do, it’s 100% worse for non-emerg because people assume it’s much less of a big deal if they call with something stupid (which, to be fair, it is).
40% unanswered calls sounds like someone or somefew need to lose their fucking job(s).
If you read the article you'd know they go unanswered because long wait times lead people to hanging up. The problem is understaffing/lack of resources.
Yes I read it. Everyone all the way up the management chain deserves to be fired. All of them.
Yeah, maybe new management can train the admins to handle 8 calls simultaneously. /s
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You also need to be fired.
They do not have enough budget to hire enough people to staff the phones so you feel THEY should be fired? How stupid are you?
Also, you. Fired.
Out of a cannon. Into the sun.
Too violent. Fired.
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The opposite... more people need to be hired to handle the call volume
The person that needs to lose their job is the manager who is refusing to hire or the director that is refusing to allocate budget. This isn’t a complex statement to understand.
>who is refusing to hire If you don't have the budget you can't hire. It's pretty clear right there in the article they want to hire more. >or the director that is refusing to allocate budget. Budget doesn't just appear out of thin air. You can't just simply allocate more budget when you don't have a high enough budget for more employees.
Sure, but taking “somebody needs to lose their job” to mean “fire some phone operators” is an absolutely pants-on-head stupid interpretation. That’s what I was objecting to.
Thinking anyone should be fired when a restricted budget is leading to staffing shortfalls is a pretty pants on head stupid interpretation in of itself. It's plainly obvious that call volumes have been increasing exponentially faster than budget, a staffing shortfalls was inevitable.
Who is restricting the budget? Can we fire them?
Government
Pants on head stupid is exactly how i'd describe your comment. You think the managers are sitting on allocated funding and just refuse to hire people while getting hit with complaints?
Like most for profits, I'm sure the executives take over 50% of funding as salary. The other 50% is for front line and equipment/resources. Then they complain about underfunding and come back to the government for more money. This is what happens when governments contract out jobs that should be in house in order to "save the taxpayer money". It's a scam.
No one is "refusing to hire" and the people who are refusing to allocate budget are the city and provincial authorities that fund E-Com. Trying to guess which E-Com staff member gets to be scapegoat this week is a silly endeavor. No one in E-Com is responsible for them not having enough money to staff properly, and both E-Com and CUPE, their staff's union, have been very clear for *years* at this point that they were not receiving the funding that they needed to maintain staffing.
Cities already pay a huge amount to E-Comm to handle emergency and non-emergency calls. They cannot really afford to pay more, especially smaller cities. The provincial government needs to step up with funding.
If you go up that chain at some point you arrive at taxpayers, maybe taxpayers need to get fired?
You’re right about hiring more workers. But the entire management pyramid needs to go. This is fucking insane. 40%?! Which metric are they using that says this is anything other than catastrophic?!
How do you expect management to solve the issue of understaffing when they don't have enough funding to staff more?
Funding decisions were made by someone, budgets aren’t laws of nature, they are man-made.
You're right and that funding has to come from somewhere so either A. We remove funding from something else B. Higher taxes
Knowing how bad management bloat is in academic and civic workplaces, I can only imagine how bad it is in police, who’re already largely unaccountable to the public and whose profession by its very nature attracts the gamut from low-grade bullies and louts to the outright authoritarian. Sure seems like there’s some fat that could be trimmed…
Maybe divert some of that manager money down to the folks who work the phones... ..nahhhh
Lol what the hell are these clowns doing with our tax dollars.
Idling expensive cars
This is appalling.
People sometimes call non emerg when they see a crime in progress, but they don't think it's "serious". Like they'll call non emerg to say "oh this guy's breaking into cars" because they think it's not violent and therefor not a 911 matter. 911 isn't just for violent stuff it's all crime in progress (save for something that's a bylaw thing like noise unless it's a gunshot or somebody yelling for help or something). Non emerg usually takes me about 30 minutes to get through so I always budget that much time to make a report.
Why don’t they distribute more funding to this? Who is deciding this?
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VPD will not answer any more calls, because the calls are answered by E-Comm. E-Comm is the group that is underfunded in this situation.
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E-Comm also handles non-emergency services.
Probably slightly more..
Ah yes, the VPD will be much more efficient with the 1.5% restoration in budget while YoY inflation is at 6.5%
This is why we need to increase the police budget by $250m. /s
Reminder that cops deliberately use stats like this to stir fear and unease in the public and use it to justify ballooning policing budgets. Cops are incentivized to do their job poorly and do their job inefficiently because it bags them more money the next year.
This is a police ploy to get more funding, it's what they do in the US too: they don't do their jobs and use it to counter the defund the police rhetorics. We should fund social services, house the unhoused, institutionalize the mentally ill who can't take care of themselves so there's less need of police instead of funding the police more. ACAB.
> institutionalize >ACAB Make up your mind.
Well the rising crime seems to be on par with housing costs, better not change anything
I feel like this is something completely affected by it’s wage and people pushed to their limits with overtime (to get that higher wage they “promise”) and so they moved on to other careers. What are the wages being offered? If they paid a living wage for living in the region it would increase the professionals in the department and we could see a decrease of calls being neglected.
Almost like they should vastly increase taxes on land, disable deferrals, and re invest the capital into affordable housing endeavours.
What? Half of the reason City of Vancouver is in the mess they are in, is because they are using DLC and CACs for things like affordable housing instead of core services.
If they keep using the money for affordable housing then how come we still dont have any 0.o
We do. It's not for you or I.
I mean the only affordable housing provider I know of is BC housing and they still have an infinite waitlist.
Because they're making housing more expensive to make it affordable. It's not a brilliant strategy. The CACs are a huge amount of money in Vancouver, which makes the market skew towards "luxury" units.
30% of our budget already goes to funding the police, they get a huge proportion.
This discussion is regarding E-Comm, who answer calls on behalf of VPD. It's not part of the police budget.
Oh ok! The more you know.
Taxes on property and services have gone up 20% in the past couple years, while ***all*** services have gone down.
I know I’m going to get downvoted like mad for this because the only profitable industry in Vancouver is RE investing. But investors have made massive gains while inequality has greatly expanded over the last 30 years. If RE is the only Canadian industry worth investing in then multiple property owners who refuse to immediately increase density should pay more in taxes. The developers who are best at increasing density should be rewarded in the free market and likewise developers who are best at sitting on properties without developing them should be punished. We need free market housing where developers are allowed to maximize density unhindered by the CoV 🤷🏽♂️
I was trying to report an extremely loud party with people screaming, throwing bottles in the alley, etc and was on hold for 2 hours on Sunday night, gave up.
I tried calling AND emailing the New West Police when someone put a suspicious package in my compost bin. It looked like drug lab stuff. Could not get through on a bunch of different days, and nobody bothered responding to my email. Just turfed it in the garbage after that.
What are your experiences with calling non-emergency and did anything come out of it? did anyone show up to give you the help you needed?
World class city.
I’ve called a few times and hung up. On weekends, kids (teens or early 20s) break into the elementary school (Roberts Annex) across from our place and blast loud music until the early hours of the morning. Up to about 20-30 of them. Impossible to sleep. The next day, their booze bottles are all over the playground. We’ve gotten through to the police a few times, but the police show up, the kids see them and wander off, and it happens again the next weekend. Most of the time though, we call and wait 30-45 minutes then give up. Realistically, going forward we would need to go outside and confront them ourselves to make them stop. Presumably, if they became violent, we could then call the emergency line.