Rachel Carr started losing hope after she hit the five-hour mark on hold with Toronto police’s non-emergency line, but couldn’t bring herself to hang up since she’d already waited for so long.
“I still had a glimmer of hope that maybe they would eventually pick up, but unfortunately it didn’t happen,” she said.
Instead, right as the call entered the 12th hour, Carr was disconnected, meaning she didn’t get to report that her and her husband’s vehicles had been badly keyed outside their home, resulting in what she estimates is around $8,000 in damage.
“I find it quite alarming,” she said.
“For me in my life, is it going to make a huge difference in this case? No. But another time, could it make a huge difference? Absolutely it could.”
CBC Toronto has reported extensively on long 911 wait times, sometimes for up to 10 minutes, answered in the same call centre as non-emergency calls and by the same people. Investigations by CBC Toronto have previously found 911 wait times have continually worsened in recent years amid staffing issues, but police have said they’ve been improving in recent months.
This month, the call centre has come under scrutiny again as the city reviews a 911 call in which a caller waited on hold for nearly seven minutes while a teen was dying from a gunshot wound.
Toronto police spokesperson Nadine Ramadan says the service recognizes no one should have to wait hours on the non-emergency line, and how frustrating it can be.
“The reported situation and the wait time is not reflective of the usual average on our non-emergency line. We are reviewing this case to determine the cause and ensure every call in is addressed,” Ramadan said of Carr’s experience.
12-hour wait
Carr says she first tried to report the incident online, but the Toronto police website says theft or vandalism over $5,000 must be reported by calling the non-emergency line.
Carr first called the non-emergency line on June 16 and waited on hold for one hour and 22 minutes, according to call logs reviewed by CBC Toronto. She says she accidentally hung up, so she called right back and waited for just over an hour before she got disconnected.
Carr called back and asked the person at the switchboard when it would be less busy, and was told to try in the morning.
On June 17, Carr called at 8:41 a.m. and waited to speak with someone from the communications centre for 12 hours, call logs show. She says the line got disconnected and she never did speak to anyone.
It wasn’t until after CBC reached out to Toronto police to inquire about Carr’s case that police contacted her and sent an officer to her home to take a vandalism report. A police spokesperson asked CBC Toronto to share Carr’s phone number, saying it would help the call centre look into the situation, which Carr agreed to.
While Carr says she’s appreciative that police followed up, she’s still concerned long wait times are deterring people from reporting crimes such as auto theft, vandalism and hate crimes, which could skew data used to make policing and political decisions.
“If it’s happening to me, there’s no way it’s not happening to other people and there really would be an impact in terms of statistics,” Carr said.
‘Just unbelievable’
Max Arnold also faced a long wait when he called earlier this month to report a driving infraction he witnessed in downtown Toronto.
Call logs show Arnold phoned the non-emergency line just before 6 p.m. on June 12 and waited for a little over 20 minutes. He called back a few hours later and waited for another 30 minutes. Arnold called the next morning and was on hold for two hours before he could speak with someone from the communications centre.
Arnold says he was shocked with just the 20-minute wait time.
“The idea of waiting 20 minutes to speak to the police was just unbelievable. It was unfathomable by the standards of when I previously reached out to non-emergency police under other circumstances,” he said.
“I can absolutely see why some people would say, ‘You know what? If reporting something to the police takes at least two hours of my time, it isn’t worth my time or effort.'”
Police working to reduce wait times
Toronto police didn’t respond to a question about concerns that crimes are going unreported given long wait times.
Ramadan reiterated the communications operators answer both 911 and non-emergency calls, and said the police service received 279,998 non-emergency calls so far this year and more than 30,000 this month alone.
In all of 2024, there were 652,244 non-emergency calls, they say, according to TPS’s annual report. The year-to-date average wait time for non-emergency calls in 2025 is four minutes and 53 seconds and June’s average wait was six minutes and 26 seconds, according to Ramadan.
“When there is a surge in emergency calls, resources are prioritized to ensure those calls are answered first, which can impact wait times on the non-emergency line,” she said.
Ramadan also said accidental 911 calls continue to place strain on the system, noting last year 27 per cent of 911 calls came from pocket dials and misdials.
Toronto’s auditor general released a report in 2022 making 26 recommendations to improve call answering times within the city’s call centre, with a focus on boosting staffing levels.
Ramadan says the service is hiring three classes of 90 new communications operators this year and also pointed to the implementation of a new 911 system aimed at improving response times in May.
Still, John Sewell, a former Toronto mayor and coordinator of the Toronto Police Accountability Coalition, which works to make the police more accountable to the public, says more improvement is needed.
“They had an [auditor general’s] report on it three years ago saying you’ve got to fix up your act and here we are three years later and they haven’t fixed the 911 system,” he said. “They’ve allowed this non-emergency system to go into the same sort of situation and this is not good enough.”
TPS aims to meet a non-legislated national call answering time standard for 911 calls: that all 911 calls are answered within 15 seconds. The most recent available data from January to May of 2024 shows, on average, 62 per cent of 911 calls met the standard each month. Ramadan says there isn’t a standard for non-emergency wait times, but the goal is to respond as quickly as possible.
Sewell says the public deserves to have their call answered in a reasonable timeframe.
“This is not a private business, where you’ve got your choices as to where else you can go. You’ve got the police and that’s it,” he said.
