Halton Police Become First Canadian Agency to Use AI Simulations to Hire 911 Call Takers

Halton Regional Police in Ontario have started using artificial intelligence to recruit and train the people who answer 911 calls, The Canadian Press reported on October 11. The force, west of Toronto, says it is the first Canadian agency to buy the technology, which comes from the American firm GovWorx.

The software builds simulated emergency calls that applicants work through, so evaluators can see how candidates make decisions, communicate and handle a crisis before they are hired. Brian Dodd, who manages the service’s 911 communications bureau, told the news agency that the department has been dealing with a staffing crisis because not every new hire makes it through training that runs close to a year. Screening with AI scenarios at the start of the process, he said, helps find the right people early. Halton says the approach cuts candidate evaluation time by 50 per cent, and the same tool will be used in communicator training and to assess staff after they are hired.

The service currently has 75 dispatchers and call takers and plans to hire between four and eight more this year. Dodd noted that GovWorx tools are already used in hundreds of communication centres in the United States.

What it means in practice

This is not Halton’s first use of AI on the phone lines. A separate system, SARA AI, handles certain non-emergency calls. Police say it has answered 95,367 calls so far this year, spent 1,195 hours talking with residents and sent more than 2,470 text messages pointing people to other reporting channels, such as the collision reporting centre. The force credits it with trimming almost two seconds from the average 911 wait. Dodd said Halton meets the North American standard of answering 90 per cent of 911 calls within 15 seconds and wants to do better.

Public bodies elsewhere in Canada are testing AI with varying degrees of caution, from Quebec’s exploratory deal to try Cohere in its public service to the failed AI agent probes reported at Library and Archives Canada. Researchers have also urged tiered transparency rules so people know when AI shapes a public service.

What to watch: whether shorter screening translates into more recruits completing training, how candidates are told that AI is part of their evaluation, and whether other Ontario police services follow Halton’s lead.