London's police chief explains why it takes 4.5 days to respond to your 911 call
Chief Thai Truong is proposing a different policing model to address city's changing needs
London police Chief Thai Truong said officers are in "reactive" mode from the moment they start their shift, working to respond to emergency calls that can take days to attend to.
Truong, who has been in the leadership role for six months, is looking for annual budget increases that would add $40 million to the current London police budget, to $171 million by 2027.
He wants to redesign how policing is done in London, and says that will take money. As he explained to London Morning host Andrew Brown, the status quo isn't working.
"In 2018, we responded in 1 hour and 34 minutes, but today we're responding in 7 hours and 9 minutes," Truong said when describing a woman calling 911 to report a domestic assault.
He said the response time for life-threatening situations is still approximately 9 minutes, but when triage deems a call to be less urgent, called a 'Code 3', the wait time is 109 hours — that's 4.5 days.
"That's completely unacceptable," Truong said.
New way to respond
If city council approves the budgetary increase in early 2024, the plan would be to redesign how front-line officers work.
Truong said they would respond to calls, but instead of taking the investigation from start to finish, they would collect the initial interviews which would then be handed off to an investigative team.
"What I'm proposing is that our officers respond to the critical need immediately, and then they turn over that investigation to a trained team. The team would work alongside frontline officers. This would allow frontline officers to get back on the road," Truong said.
The chief said the new service model would require 189 new positions, including 97 new officers.