Behind the Frontline: 911 - Know your role
Transcript
Jason (911 operator speaking)
RCMP Bonjour.
Well I mean it’s possible that maybe you bought a vehicle that maybe it was stolen, that’s possible.
I’m Jason Steel and I work at the Southern Alberta OCC, that’s the Operational Control Center for the RCMP here in Alberta.
Some days there might be not much going on, but most days we are busy. We are all day flat out busy.
That was the Canadian Anti-Fraud Center? Is that the one you called?
Tracy (911 supervisor speaking)
We find that one of the most troubling things is we deal with 911 as well as non-emergency calls for the Province for all the RCMP divisions. For us, people that hang up before telling us what they were calling about on 911 is certainly one of our biggest challenges. We encourage everyone to stay on the line even if whatever it is they are calling about is changed or they see that someone else is on the line calling the same thing in. We need to be able to match the call with the event. Unfortunately when people hang up without us speaking to them, it then causes a back-load in our Comms center. Each of the operators that are here today will be dealing with those types of calls and it can take 3 to 5 minutes or more to try to make that file and to follow up with it with the requirements we have.
Kim (911 operator speaking)
When you reach the police, you are talking to the dispatch center, your talking to me or one of my co-workers. Often it is not from the area you are calling from, so we need to ask you where you are calling from and we want you to help us by giving information of where you are. We know that you are in a stressful situation, so we are there to help you.
Jason (911 operator speaking)
The key things we are looking for when you call 911, is we want to know where you are, who you are, what’s happening...when this happened. Is it something that’s going on right now or is this something that has happened in the past. We want to know about safety concerns like weapons, alcohol, drugs because those impact how our officers are going to attend and what their going to be dealing with when they get there.
Tracy (911 supervisor speaking)
Cell phones have added pocket dialing, that’s a big concern. We also have people that don't realize that disconnected cell phones still can call 911, even if it not on a service providers. We actually had an incident a few weeks ago where one cell phone was responsible for 300 phone calls within a 4 hour period and that was tying up our resources on our 911 operators that are a primary service access point that take the calls before we get them and then to our center as well as our officers that were trying to investigate and trying to find out where this phone was coming form. A disconnected cell phone doe not come in with the phone number. We can’t just call the person back on that line. With that in mind our investigation opportunities to try and find out who had that phone last is very difficult. We knew that likely there wasn't an emergency, you could hear a child playing in the background, but unfortunately they didn't realize that it was calling through.
Kim (911 operator speaking)
When you call in, we understand that you are under a lot of stress. Your dialing 911 because your in a potential emergency situation. For us we want to be there as your support, we want to try to get you down to a level where your going to be able to give us information to help you.
Jason (911 operator speaking)
When someone calls and the first thing they say is just “get them here!”, but they haven't told us where here is, they haven't told us what’s happening there, we don’t know. All they know is that something major has just happened and they’re scared. So we just need to be able to calm them down, get them back on track and focus so they can help us to help them.
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