The easing of Covid restrictions has seen Sussex Police dealing with thousands more emergency and 101 calls.
During a performance and accountability meeting with Police & Crime Commissioner Katy Bourne, Deputy Chief Constable Julia Chapman reported that more than 17,000 999 calls had been received throughout March.
This compared to just over 14,000 in February.
Non-emergency 101 calls increased from just over 21,000 in February to 26,255 in March.
There was good news regarding the time it took for calls to be answered — an area which has been something of a problem in the past.
Some 96 per cent of 999 calls were answered within 10 seconds.
The national standard is for 90 per cent to be answered in that time — Sussex Police has beaten that target for the past 18 months.
When it came to 101 calls, the waiting times have seen a huge drop over the past three years.
In 2018/19, the average was 14 minutes 16 seconds.
That fell to seven minutes nine seconds in 2019/20 and three minutes 25 seconds in 2020/21.
Ms Chapman told the meeting that, in February the time was two minutes 17 seconds, though that rose to just over three minutes in March.
Far fewer people have been abandoning their calls.
In March 2019, 42 per cent hung up because their call was not answered.
That fell to 15 per cent in March 2020 and stood at 7.5 per cent this March.
Ms Chapman said a ‘significant amount of work’ had been carried out by staff at the force’s contact centre, in Lewes, and that things had been helped due to an increase in staff and the introduction of call-back technology such as "Queue Buster".
As well as phone calls, the force saw an increase in emails and web contacts between February and March — rising from 18,500 contacts to 22,500.
To protect contact centre staff during the pandemic, they were split between four sites, allowing them to work in smaller numbers.
Ms Chapman said:
“It was challenging for us, there’s no doubt about it — it tested our IT provision in particular.
“But the positive attitude of our staff really helped us because they were keen to move to protect themselves and make sure they could still give that really good service to the public.”
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