Disclaimer: With the exception of total annual calls received and staff numbers, all other totals in the following article are based on a count by the writer and were not provided by RCMP.
REGINA - When someone in North Battleford, or Unity, or Blaine Lake or anywhere else in Saskatchewan calls the local RCMP detachment and no one is there, the call is routed to the Division Operational Communication Centre in Regina; 911 calls also come to the DOCC.
Last month the DOCC posted the key complaint of every call live online from 6 p.m. Nov. 29 to 2 a.m. Nov. 30. The calls were posted as tweets on the Twitter website.
Over the course of the evening, 125 calls were received from across the province, 27 from the south district, and 49 from each of the central and north districts. One officer posted, the dispatchers "are the unsung heroes of police work. They do a great job 24/7!"
News-Optimist readers live in the central district. The north district covers everywhere north of Prince Albert and the south district covers the province south of Regina. Cities such as Saskatoon and Regina, which have their own municipal police forces, are not included.
The Twitter posts started with a report of a hit and run in the south district. Four hit and run calls were received in all, two from the south and two from the central district. A call from the south district was also the final call of the evening, this one being a business alarm call. There were five alarm calls altogether.
One of the most frequent types of calls were 911 calls where the caller hung up. The officers running the Twitter feed advised, "If you accidentally call 911, do not hang up. If we are unable to reach you, a police officer must be sent out to investigate stay on the line to clear it up." In response to a question, the tweet read " we realize that people can make mistakes. If it's done on purpose, you can be charged."
The other most frequent type of call related to "unwanted person at a residence" or "unwanted people at a resident" as well as "intoxicated person(s) at a residence." In fact, at one point, the RCMP tweeter added the words, "yes, another one."
Motor vehicle collisions - with and without injuries - and sometimes involving wildlife, impaired drivers, assaults, a phone scam, obstructed highways, stolen vehicles, missing people and a house fire were some of the incidents the public were calling RCMP about. Perhaps the most amusing post was "call from intoxicated person with no complaint," of which there were two.
In the central district, the most common call was a false 911 call. There were four of those, along with three 911 calls with no complaint and three 911 hang-up calls. As well three single vehicle accidents with no injuries were reported, along with three missing person calls.
As well as tweeting a short description of each call received Nov. 29, the DOCC answered questions asked on Twitter. Over 239,000 calls are received annually. The call volume Nov. 29 was average for a non-weekend evening. The dispatch centre has 56 employees and eight people were on shift answering phones that evening.
A DOCC spokesperson said tweeting the gist of the calls, all done without compromising the safety of officers or the privacy of anyone, was "really just to educate the public and show them the scope and variety of our work on a daily basis."
For those interested in scrolling through the tweets themselves, they can be found on Twitter with the hashtag #CopCalls.
