Move to reassure public on 999 calls

(Left to right) Garda Commissioner Drew Harris; Chief Bureau Officer Detective Chief Superintendent Michael Gubbins and Minister for Justice Heather Humphreys TD. Photo: Leah Farrell / RollingNews.ie

The Garda Commissioner and the Justice Minister have moved to reassure the public that they will receive the appropriate police response when they ring 999 or their local station looking for help or reporting a crime.

It came amid another twist in the ongoing ‘999 cancellation’ saga, which has already resulted in an external investigation, ordered by the Policing Authority, into improper cancellation in the Garda Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) system of thousands of 999 calls.

The latest development relates to a separate batch of calls – totalling 19,000 over the last 10 months – which were classified as ‘intelligence’ calls in CAD, where an initial sample has revealed that two cases related to serious crime.

The development resulted in the Policing Authority issuing a strongly-worded public statement on Thursday expressing serious concern that such events were still happening despite all the controversy and measures taken by Garda HQ to address it.

Commissioner Drew Harris sought to reassure the public about the 999 system: “I want to make sure there is public confidence in garda for assistance – that’s my major message.”

Justice Minister Heather Humphreys said: "It’s important for people to realise that when they do ring 999 they will get an appropriate response and it's important people have confidence in it. I want to reassure them that they will get the response they deserve."

The controversy, which emerged last year, centres around the cancellation of more than 200,000 999 calls between 2019 and 2020. Of these, more than 3,000 calls were related to domestic violence.

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While many cancellations were valid or duplicates, thousands were deemed incorrectly cancelled.

Last month, before a public authority meeting, the commissioner expressed his shock after a further 53 emergency calls had been cancelled since the controversy and measures he had introduced to address it.

The authority statement on Thursday expressed exasperation at the continuation of the problem and said the new issues were of “serious concern” and that some of the incidents were identified as “very high risk”.

Commissioner Harris said there were more calls in the intelligence category than they expected and there was a concern that there might be more than the two cases they found, from an initial dip sample.

The police chief stressed that many of these calls were not 999 calls but “calls for service” or to provide information to gardaí or calls from gardaí on the ground passing on intelligence.

He said that, in addition to checking whether every one of the 19,000 calls were properly classified as intelligence, as opposed to crime, they need to check with the relevant garda divisions in each case if there was a garda response.

He also said they also needed to examine if there was a Pulse incident which did record any crime in those cases. He said he was “loathe to rush to judgement” until he knew precisely what happened and that it was “too early” to make conclusions.