Police calls increased in Edmonton in 2018, and officers continued to struggle to respond on time.
Edmonton police has five priority levels with time targets:
- P1 – In progress person at risk (7 minutes or fewer)
- P2 – In progress property at risk (12 minutes)
- P3 – Just occurred (17 minutes)
- P4 – Time sensitive (40 minutes)
- P5 – General Service (180 minutes)
The majority of calls in 2018 were P4 or P5, where, for example, a shoplifter is in custody or a business or home was broken into. Calls that required a faster response, P1-P3, made up 8.3 per cent of the total.
Officers met P1 response times in 2018 72.4 per cent of the time—an improvement in comparison to 2017 (71.9), but still below the 80 per cent target.
On Thursday, new EPS Chief Dale McFee wondered about the response time targets that were set before he arrived in Edmonton.
“What’s the difference between seven minutes and nine minutes? Does it actually have an impact?
“If you’re not there in the first two minutes, then good chance that bad things have happened, so what’s the difference between nine minutes and seven minutes, and how did we come to that?"
While P2 and P3 response times exceeded targets, P4 (67.7) and P5 (51.1) were well below the 80 per cent mark.
EPS Strategic Analyst Cal Schafer attributes the growth in calls to an increase to Edmonton’s population.
