999 and 101 calls return to pre-pandemic levels in Surrey
Surrey Police have also introduced additional ways to now report crimes
Surrey Police have seen a rise in demand for both 999 and 101 calls.
During the last 18 months the contact centre has faced several challenges in terms of both the demand around COVID-19 and the need to act quickly and flexible to ensure the team maintained social distancing requirements, whilst still delivering their core objective to the public.
Crime Superintendent Juliet Parker told us despite the challenges, their priority has always remained the same:
"Our priority is to get the 999 calls answers and look at our 999 performance. The national target time being 10 seconds and our average wait time for 999 calls has always been below 10 seconds, throughout this period of challenge and previously since June 2018"
101 calls have a national target of 3 minutes which was met with 55.8% of calls.
Juliet added:
"Performance for 101 at the moment continues to be a greater challenge due to the large increase in demand, calls for service have gone up since we've come out of lockdown"
The past bank holiday weekend saw some of the highest levels of calls ever recorded nationally.
Since June 2020 Surrey Police have also introduced new ways to report crimes including via social media and web chat.