Increasing emergency calls driving high turnover in 911 call centre, Winnipeg police say

Increasing demands for service from Winnipeg police are putting a debilitating strain on the people working in the city's emergency call centre, a new report shows.

Turnover at the public service access point (PSAP), the call centre for all emergency services in Winnipeg, is 45 per cent, with 30 per cent of new hires quitting within a year.

"What that means to me is that's a very stressful environment in there," police Chief Danny Smyth said after the Winnipeg Police Board meeting on Friday "People think they want to do this work and then they get in there and they realize this is not for me."

The call centre triages requests for service according to how urgent they are. Since last year, the number of calls they consider life-threatening rose 26 per cent.

Smyth called the rising number of emergency calls "alarming," and said the high attrition rate at the city's dispatch centre is "the canary in the coal mine."

"The demand for service is outstripping the resources that we have," Smyth said. "I focused primarily on the PSAP … but that has an impact on the street as well."

Emergency calls require more police resources — at least five units each — and take officers away from less urgent matters.

That could be contributing to another problem police highlighted on Friday: A new survey conducted by Prairie Research Associates for the police suggests public opinion of the service has fallen.

The number of respondents who said  police did an excellent or good job has dropped to 46 per cent from 64 per cent in 2019.

The percentage of people who thought police responded promptly to calls also fell to 45 per cent from 51 per cent.

The number of people who think police are over-funded rose to 19 per cent from nine per cent.

The Winnipeg Police Service budget rose by $7 million this year to $320 million – more than one-quarter of the city's total budget.

The City of Winnipeg has asked the police service to find $9.1 million in savings this year. In their report to the board on Friday, they said they expect to only reach about one-third of that.

If the city demands more than that, the service will have to make cuts, Smyth said.

"It's people, let's be clear on that. You know that 85, 86 per cent of our budget is people and salaries, so we would be cutting service," he said.

This comes after the city approved $7.3 million in overspending for the police service last year year, $6.1 million less than the police service had requested.

The telephone survey was conducted from Aug. 15-22 and included 600 adults living in Winnipeg. It has margin of error of four percentage points, 19 times out of 20.