Making Edmonton police response times public again: It’s complicated

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Edmonton Police Commissioners voted this week not to make Edmonton Police Service response time numbers public just yet.

The radio silence from 2021 will continue for the time being.

At the height of the pandemic, the Edmonton Police Service (EPS) stopped reporting response times in its annual report.

That same year, the EPS also moved to an encrypted scanner the media and the public couldn’t listen to.

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Thursday’s motion to know response time numbers came from city Coun. Anne Stevenson, a commissioner who also sits on the Edmonton Police Commission’s governance committee.

“That is not the only metric that shares how the service is performing, but I think for Edmontonians, that is an important measure to at least understand what those response times are,” Stevenson told the commission.

The time it takes for an officer to attach to a call was one of the main factors to sell the commission on switching to the much-touted “10 Squad” model, she said.

“It’s something that I continue to hear from Edmontonians in terms of an interest in having an understanding of how that’s trending. I think if it’s a resource question, that’s a really important one.”

There are two steps to getting from the call for service to the service itself. First, the call is assigned to an officer, then the officer goes to the call. That window, from dispatch to the scene, is the sweet spot.

Outgoing Police Chief Dale McFee decried paying too much minute-by-minute attention to response times.

“And the reality is, we had the highest crime rate in the country … for many years, because our main metric was measured response calls and times, which is really irrelevant, because if I have a priority call, I want to know why you weren’t there faster than you were. It’s not an average response time. Average response times gets average results. That’s why we changed,” McFee said.

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In the sometimes dangerous world of responding to emergencies, police response time shouldn’t be a main consideration, said the chief, who announced his February 2025 retirement this week.

The construction conundrum

Anyone who has tried to inch forward in a construction zone to let flashing lights by knows construction ties up emergency vehicles. Back in 2021, some Edmontonians fumed on social media about the city kicking off construction projects — complaints that rage on.

“The level of construction happening on major thoroughfares in the city would dramatically impact your response time right now,” McFee said.

“The second half of part of why that was taken away is if we use that as a target measure for officers, decisions about how quickly and safely they will travel to those calls become part of that thinking process when an officer is getting to a call.”

Commissioner Ben Henderson said he remembers seeing call response numbers for years, but he takes the chief’s point.

“A worry about all these things with metrics is you create an imprecise metric, and then you begin to develop your response to it, to meet the metric, not what you’re really trying to achieve,” Henderson said.

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A few commissioners expressed concern the request seemed to get ahead of strategic planning.

Gaps and goals plan

The response time issue may not be dead in the water.

The commissioners were assured by Lori Lorenz, executive director of the EPS Value & Impact division, that gaps and goals will be addressed in the EPS 2025 strategic plan.

“In 2021 we did have Priority 1 calls in there, and so we are discussing how to highlight that again, and that will be coming forward in our annual report in Q1 of 2025,” Lorenz said.

“I think that, in history, we took out call response time as it’s not a strategic measure to identify if we’re meeting our goals,” she said.

The 10-squad model previous numbers were applied to “is having an evaluation right now,” she said.

“One of the primary outcomes of that is to ensure we have the right people at the right place, at the right time,” Lorenz said.

Other jurisdictions

Municipal transparency on and use of response times can vary by jurisdiction.

In a memorandum for Calgary City Council in 2023, the Calgary Police Service cited five years of numbers for drive time from dispatch to the call scene, showing a gradual creep from eight minutes in 2018 to 9.5 minutes in 2022.

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Among a number of other metrics, they set a goal of decreasing the drive time from when a call is dispatched to Priority 1 calls — the most urgent types of calls — and when officers arrive on scene.

“It is reflection of the availability of resources and how effectively those resources are deployed across the city. The target is to maintain or improve the five-year average response time of eight minutes this year,” the memorandum read.

At the Vancouver Police Department, the Public Safety Indicators (PSI) report covers key trends, with numbers of calls for service and Priority 1 response times.

In April 2024, Toronto Police Chief Myron Demkiw celebrated “a modest, yet consistent reduction in the time it takes to get to Torontonians when they need us most,” with response times to Priority 1 calls dropping from 22 minutes to 18.1 minutes.

“While we are seeing a positive, promising trend in relation to Priority 1 response times, I am also mindful that we have a lot of work to still do in this area,” he said.

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