999 Calls

Request number: FOI/16748

Category: Incident and Crime Statistics - Calls for Service (999/101/Response Times) 

Subject: 999 Calls

Request and Answer:

Your request for information has now been considered. In respect of Section 1(1)(a) of the Freedom of Information Act, we can confirm that the Police Service of Northern Ireland does hold the information you have requested to which your request relates. The decision has been taken to disclose the following.

Request 1

The time in which the force is expected to respond to 999 calls.

Answer

10 Seconds

Request 2

The number of 999 calls received by the force in each year from 2020 to 2025.

Answer

The figures are provided online by the organisation via the following link

www.psni.police.uk/about-us/our-publications-and-reports/our-publication-scheme/what-our-priorities-are-and-how-we-are

Request 3

The number of occasions on which no police car was available to answer a 999 call in each year from 2020 to 2025

Answer

Please see the response in the table below, which was retrieved using the search words' no free crew' and 'no crew available'.

For information, keyword searches are an unreliable method of collecting data from the Niche recording database because they rely on searching through unstructured data. This means that you cannot automatically determine the context of the term found in the search result and a manual review is almost always be required to decide if the result meets the criteria of the FOi request and retrieval will often exceed the appropriate cost limit.

For unstructured data fields we also cannot rely on the data having been entered in such a way as to identify those records that are relevant. Spelling mistakes, abbreviations and aliases can all affect the reliability of a keyword search.