MORE THAN 500 calls for help from the public to Dublin’s Garda central control centre had not been responded to at one point on Tuesday evening because there were not enough gardaí available, The Journal has learned.

It is understood to be an ongoing issue, with garda controllers unable to dispatch gardaí to deal with incidents.

The garda’s dispatch system is known as Command and Control and based in the city centre. 

It is staffed by gardaí and some civilian call takers. The communication gardaí enter the calls into a computerised system which then assigns the call to units.

Calls are taken in from phone calls to garda stations but also on the 999 system.

This call dispatch system records how many calls have been answered and those gardaí were unable to respond to.

At the end of a shift, command and control then forward on to the oncoming unit any calls that were not responded to – on Tuesday evening at 7pm there were 523 held over individual incidents.

Sources have said that this issue has developed as the amount of available gardaí is not matched with the level of demand for the service. 

They have also said that since the 999 call cancelling scandal there is now a policy that all calls from the public must be responded to by a garda.

There is also a problem, sources said, whereby regular gardaí may make an arrest which requires them to question a suspect – sources have said this “grounds” the car and takes them away from answering calls.  

Sources said that individual gardaí were recommending members of the public to attend garda stations themselves to make reports.

A garda spokesperson refused to comment on the figure of 523 unresponded calls by Dublin gardaí but confirmed that there were incidents being held over on a regular basis. 

In a statement An Garda Síochána said that all calls received at the DMR Control Room, either through the 999 system or through local Garda stations, “are initially assessed and given a priority categorisation”.

“Calls remain subject to ongoing risk assessment based on additional information, if any, received in respect of any individual call.

“Calls are prioritised for response based on initial categorisations, additional information received which may increase or reduce the prioritisation, the availability of the most suitable resource to respond to the call and the immediate need or otherwise for a Garda response.

“Each call is unique, not every call to the DMR Regional Control Room requires an immediate Garda response. There is and always will be calls on hold within the control environment,” the statement said.

A statement has also been requested from the Department of Justice.

The Journal spoke to sources in other large urban areas who said that there is an ongoing issue of held over calls in areas such as Limerick and Cork city. But numbers in those cities are in the dozens rather than the hundreds, as in Dublin. 

Garda numbers falling

The issue of insufficient numbers of gardaí to respond to calls hit the headlines this week after an assault of a US tourist in Dublin.

At a public meeting this week Assistant Commissioner Angela Willis, who has responsibility for policing in Dublin, said the force was “down on numbers we would want to have.”

Her comments came after it was revealed earlier this week that the number of gardaí in Dublin’s north inner city is down almost 4% since the start of the year.

The Government had a target of increasing the size of the force to 15,000 by 2021. The latest statistics show the total number of gardaí at the end of June was 13,892 – 241 fewer than at the start of the year.

When officers who are on career breaks, work-sharing, secondments and maternity and parental leave are excluded, the total number of available gardaí falls to 13,658.

The latest figures show the overall number of frontline gardaí has dropped to 12,009 since the end of December – a decrease of 264 or 2.2% nationally.