City says 9-1-1 calls in Calgary are increasing and getting more complex

Being a 9-1-1 operator in Calgary is an increasingly challenging job, as call volume and complexity grows.

City of Calgary data says around one million emergency and non-emergency calls are made to 9-1-1 in Calgary each year.

Dispatchers support the Calgary Police Service, Calgary Fire Department, Community Safety Peace Officers, and serve as the dispatch centre for 11 regional fire departments. During a single shift, operators may manage up to 2,000 radio transmissions.

In 2025, calls to 9-1-1 saw a four per cent increase from 2024. Calgary Police Service and Calgary Fire Department events also each increased by five per cent last year. Regional fire events jumped 14 per cent.

Calgary 9-1-1 also supported more than 18,000 Community Peace Officer calls and redirected more than 2,000 calls to 2-1-1.

The need for dispatch support at large public events and demonstrations has also increased by around five per cent over the past five years.

Operators assigned to these events need additional, specialized training to managed an increased public safety risk.

The city says one of the largest examples is the Calgary Stampede, which continues to grow in both size and attendance, resulting in additional incident command posts and expanded monitoring needs across the city. As a result of this, requested dispatch support has increased from three dispatchers per day in 2023 to five per day in 2025.

Alongside a higher number of calls, the city says the calls themselves are getting increasingly more complicated. Since 2023, the time spent on each call has risen by 10 per cent.

Contributing factors include more calls needing language services — which typically take three times longer to process — and add a significant complexity to an emergency response.

Between 2024 and 2025, calls requiring language support went up 10 per cent.

National Public Safety Telecommunicators Week (NPSTW) is April 12–18.