The North Bay Police Service is continuing with the challenge of dealing with an increase in call volume so far in 2021.
"There are enough officers as to what our call volume is," noted Deputy Chief Mike Daze after Tuesday's monthly police board meeting at Police Headquarters on Princess Street in North Bay.
"When we are averaging 90 calls a day for the last few months, those calls are prioritized and that's a response option our officers are dispatched to."
On top of that volume is the reality that about 72 per cent of those calls are considered non-crime related.
"A lot of those calls for service take a lot of time to process and there are a lot of resources and time that is spent investigating and working through to provide that assistance," Daze explained.
He says that 72 per cent includes supporting EMS or Fire calls, social disorder, neighbourhood disputes, checking on the well-being of people, and even pandemic related calls.
"Those are all things that go into the overall pot of how are police respond to calls for service within the community," he said.
"We are looking at 33,000 to 35,000 calls a year. The nature of those calls and the content of those calls - they can ebb and flow over time. Absolutely it is an unprecedented time. Do we see more calls related to concerns of safety, health and well-being because of the pandemic? Absolutely."
Also, factor in an increase in mental health calls as well.
"Like many places across the country and Ontario, we are facing challenges with mental health-related calls and the stats we produced this morning is averaging about 200 calls per month," explained Daze.
"We identify and recognize that those do take time to investigate so we are looking at 2 to 2.5 hours per call when we look at the resources going in there is a lot of officer time being dedicated to helping individuals and that time is a cross-section."
Daze notes that there is no specific time of day where they are seeing an increase in calls and he notes that the breakdown is pretty consistent with 50 per cent of the calls coming in during work hours and the other 50 per cent coming after hours.
