Gaps in police service need to be plugged

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Insp. Bill Fogg knows there are gaps in service. (KEN GIGLIOTTI / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS ARCHIVES) Photo Store

In a city where crime news sometimes makes citizens jittery, if not outright paranoid, I can tell you my fellow residents of Linden Woods generally feel safe in their homes or even strolling around the community's centrepiece lake.

But I know a couple of my neighbours who don't feel safe anymore. Not after calling 911 about an afternoon break-in in progress and waiting two hours for police to arrive. They weren't just shocked and shook up by the delay; they were scared and angry.

Police Insp. Bill Fogg, the commander of District 6, doesn't blame them for feeling that way. If you find that candour refreshing, when he spoke he had an even bigger surprise.

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The story starts at 3:37 p.m. on Tuesday, July 31, with a 911 call from a Linden Woods resident I'll call Bob.

He had just caught a young man in his garage and flushed him out and onto a nearby bicycle the intruder had been riding around the area. The incident was dispatched to police two minutes after he called and entered as a high priority call. The same kind of "expedited response" attention, Insp. Fogg would later say, that police would give an armed robbery in progress.

Sometime during the next eight minutes, while still on the phone with the police communications centre, Bob spotted the intruder again. This time he was across the street, crawling under a neighbour's partially open garage door. Bob and the resident of that house managed to flush the intruder out again. And off he rode on his bike.

But Bob's wife, Linda, wasn't going to let him get away that easy. She followed him from a discreet distance in her car. At 3:53 p.m., more than 15 minutes after her husband first called, Linda told the 911 operator the burglar on the bike was heading for the Canadian Tire store just off Kenaston Boulevard. Sometime during the pursuit, the police communications centre operator gave up trying to find an available District 6 car and voiced a general appeal for a two-person car from anywhere to answer the call.

None would or could.

Police from the next shift finally arrived at Bob's door two hours to the minute after it was dispatched.

Fogg called the two homeowners involved to try to explain what happened.

What happened is, there were only three two-person cruisers in District 6 when the call went out. District 6 stretches from the Perimeter Highway to the west, to Osborne Village in the east and St. Norbert to the south and all bordered on the north by the Assiniboine River.

Usually, there are four cruisers at that time of day to police that sprawling section of the city, but Fogg said they had been pulled into District 3 in the North End to answer a domestic dispute. Of the other three, he said, one was also on a domestic call in District 6, one was busy with an arrest and the other was taking a theft complaint. Under normal circumstances, Fogg said, he would have expected the crew taking the theft report to drop it for a break-in in progress.

If they heard the call.

I asked Fogg if there were any other units in District 6 at that time that might have been able to respond.

"The short answer is that I have no way of knowing whether there were specialty units like traffic or detectives that were on the air and in a position to respond."

Fogg, to his credit, spent a lot of time with me giving longer answers and taking responsibility for what he said is a relatively rare occurrence on a summer day in District 6.

But along the way, I learned something that, in the big public-safety picture, was more disturbing than this one troubling incident.

There is a time of day -- not too much later than when this incident happened -- when police across the city are susceptible to not being able to answer calls promptly. It happens during shift change, when the crossing over of day to evening patrols can create a gap in service. Like the "seam" in football zone coverage that receivers run to and quarterbacks exploit.

Fogg conceded police have had that gap exploited in the past, and not by quarterbacks. He also said the issue, and how to address it, is part of an ongoing strategic plan review process.

He said the shift-change gap was not a factor in police not being able to respond in a timely way to the break-in in progress in Linden Woods, and I take him at his word.

But it shouldn't take a laborious, drawn-out strategic plan review for police to figure out a way to plug a public-safety gap everyone from 911 operators to cops on the beat have been frustrated by for years.

It needs to be dispatched internally as a high priority.

If for some reason the current chief can't or won't answer the call, then the next chief better.

gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition August 18, 2012 B1