'They do their job very well' (3 photos)

Sault Police want 9-1-1 callers to know their requests for service will be answered.

Demands on the Sault Ste. Marie Police Service have increased over the years, while the number of police officers and resources have not.

That makes it more challenging for the Sault Ste. Marie Police Service’s officers and civilian employees to answer all calls for service.

“We used to be able to write down the calls on a piece of paper, time stamp them and sit them in front of us and be able to get through it, but right now I’d have papers everywhere,” said Ellen Dewhirst.

Dewhirst has worked as a Sault Police dispatcher for 29 years.

“Our dispatchers are multi-tasking, there are so many decisions they have to make, like send these guys to this call, send that officer to that call, where they should be sending the cars and how many,” said Sergeant Lisa Kenopic.

Kenopic, as Central Emergency Reporting Bureau (CERB) supervisor, oversees the dispatch centre throughout day shift hours.

“They do their job very well,” Kenopic said of the Sault Police dispatchers.

“They’re dealing with extremely stressful calls, they’re that first person that deals with that victim or complainant, and they’re having to deescalate and keep calm for that person.”

“They get complaints of ‘where’s the car, why aren’t they here?’”

“There are so many calls for service these days, we’re so much busier.”

Police say the rise in the number of calls can be attributed to domestic incidents, an increasing number of mental health calls, as well as social disorder calls (related to alcohol and drug addictions).

“There are close to 40,000 calls for service that come through here (the 9-1-1 dispatch centre) in a year,” said Sean Sparling, Sault Police deputy chief.  

Sparling estimated 100,000 calls in total come in to the Sault Police Service building annually.

“We dispatch 32,000 to 34,000 calls for police, plus all the 9-1-1 for fire and ambulances.”

Staff Sergeants supervise the 9-1-1 dispatch centre on evenings and weekends.

Dispatch workers are on duty for 12 hour shifts, four days on and four days off.

There are two dispatchers working at any one time, with room for a third if a major incident occurs.

Sault Police currently employ eight full-time dispatchers, with another five part-time.

Friday and Saturday evenings are peak time for 9-1-1 calls, but weekdays can be equally busy.

“Last week, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, the girls didn’t stop.  From 9-1-1 calls coming in, to business line calls coming in, they were constantly answering calls for service on the phone,” Kenopic said.

So how do all those 9-1-1 calls for service get attended to?

Fire calls, of course, are rerouted to the main Sault Ste. Marie Fire Services hall at 72 Tancred Street, while ambulance calls are directed to the Emergency Medical Services building at 65 Old Garden River Road.

9-1-1 calls for police are placed in categories, from priority zero to priority nine.

“Zero is an extreme emergency, like an active shooting, a life and death situation,” Sparling said.

“Priority one and two calls involve threats to personal safety or property, in which we want to have cars available to go to at all times.”

“Priority three through nine are calls which we say can wait.  The majority of the calls we get in through here are priority three or four, so people who call in might have to wait because we want to keep cars available for high priority calls.”

“Anything below a four, like five through nine, we’re not sending officers to (at least not immediately),” Sparling said.

“We’re probably diverting up to 30 per cent of our calls right now to other means.”

One of those other means is the Sault Police alternate response centre (ARC).

“For calls that are minor in nature, we’ll have a police officer from the ARC call the person back and do the business over the phone, or at least coordinate it so we don’t have to send a police car to it, so it keeps the police cars free for other things,” Sparling explained.

“We can’t go back to city council and ask for more police officers, so we have to find a way to manage our calls.”

“It’s not uncommon for a domestic to take an officer up to six hours to complete, so you might have one of our five, two-man cars on nightshift on a Thursday, Friday or Saturday night tied up for six hours on a domestic, and we’re doing probably a couple of thousand of those a year.”

“That’s where a lot of manpower is going, is into these long-term calls and the increase in social disorder calls, so we have to find a way to manage our call volume.”

“The alternate response centre is working very well for us,” Sparling said.

“We need to let the public know (how busy officers are),” Kenopic said.

“People get frustrated with the 9-1-1 dispatchers asking ‘how come the car’s not here yet?’  We tell them we’re on higher priority emergency calls right now, but we have an officer that can speak to them right now (from the ARC) and take their report.”  

“A lot of times, that’s all they want is for an officer to speak to them and take down a report.”

“We want the public to know we have an officer here available to talk to them (through the ARC.)”

ARC is currently not available around the clock, but police are aiming to keep it staffed at peak call times.

An increasing number of 9-1-1 calls connected to mental health issues are now seen to by the recently-created Mobile Crisis Intervention Team.

Two uniformed officers, specially-trained to deal with mental health calls, are paired up with Sault Area Hospital (SAH) crisis workers on their shifts.

“That’s a great unit, it’s awesome.  We’re thankful for that,” Kenopic said.

In addition, Sault Ste. Marie Accident Support Services (Collision Reporting Centre), located within the Police Service building, is  open seven days a week. 

The Centre’s civilian staff take care of collisions in which there are no injuries, with no one taken to hospital by ambulance, and if the vehicles involved are still able to be driven.  

Most such accidents involve $2,000 or less in damage.

Dispatchers take information from a collision call and assess whether it should be referred to the Collision Reporting Centre.

The Centre, which has been located at the Sault Police Service building for the past eight years, handled 3,271 minor collisions between Aug. 2015 and July 2016, another valuable source of help to front-line police officers.

People can always report a problem to Sault Police in person.

“When it’s busy, call after call, a 12-hour shift flies by,” said Constable Anthony Vautour, duty officer.

A duty officer handles a variety of complaints, ranging from disputes between neighbours to reports of sexual assault, referring calls to appropriate departments.

If the duty officer is engaged in conversation with a member of the public at the front desk and unable to answer the phone, the call will be diverted to the ARC.

“A lot of it is listening to people who need to vent…we need to be that calming voice sometimes,” Vautour said.