London's police chief says the city needs more officers to address the growing amount of time spent on service calls placed on a day-to-day basis.
During a meeting of the London Police Services Board on Thursday, Chief Steve Williams talked about the dissolution of the Community Oriented Response Unit (COR), one of the police service's patrol support units, to help deal with the "unprecedented levels" of both emergency and non-emergent calls made to police.
"There's no question that our response time is suffering. Holding calls in the queue for days is not acceptable," Williams said.
COR is a front line patrol unit that divides the city into zones among teams of officers who work to address incidents in each community before they potentially get worse. COR's primary focus is solving problems that harm people's lives, such as prostitution and human trafficking, neighbour disputes, student parties, liquor offences, and graffiti. The officers of the COR unit are being redeployed to general patrol.
So far this year, police have spent 33,000 additional hours responding to what Chief Williams says is roughly the same number of calls compared the the same time frame of 10 months in 2020, equivalent to the work of 16 full-time police officers. In the last 12 months, the number of code 1 calls for emergencies that are life-threatening or involve serious crimes in progress have increased by 27 per cent while Code 2 calls, which are urgent but non-emergent calls, have gone up by 96 per cent. The police service has already redeployed 27 officers from other operations or units to help manage the number of calls.
While Williams acknowledged the impact of the changes will be felt in other service areas, he said ultimately, the changes are necessary to ensure adequate delivery of services to ensure public safety. Williams added it's no surprise that some officers are beginning to feel burn-out.
"Going from call-to-call, some of them without any break, is not healthy and it's not sustainable. Just like everyone else, officer's need time to process and recover between stressful and traumatic incidents. They are not always getting that," Williams said. He also explained that it is not uncommon for a patrol officer to have to respond to an emergency call, a weapons call, and a domestic-dispute consecutively, while also receiving complaints about response times.
The plea for the need of additional resources is not a new problem with staffing gaps being discussed back in 2019. Williams noted the problem is not only damaging to service members, but the community as well.
Over the last nearly two years, it's no secret that the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in significant societal changes. With that in mind, Williams believes the pandemic is not the sole reason for the problems observed in London and the surrounding areas.
"I think it's probably too simplistic to say the pandemic has caused this. It's probably a factor. I would argue there's multiple variables," Williams said.
With some push back over the decision from a few members of the board, it's clear the administration will need to take some time to consider different approaches to the issues and further budgetary submissions in the multi-year operating budget cycle.
City councillor and board vice-chair Jesse Helmer said he believes a change to the overall response of the issues on both a municipal and police level needs to be addressed before more money is spent on the police budget.
"Why are those calls are happening in the first place?" Helmer said. "I'm not convinced that just adding more to the same level is actually going to solve the problem."
Over the coming weeks and months, Williams said he hopes a more sustainable long-term solution will come to light and that the redeployment decisions will be a temporary setback and not a permanent change.