It is the one awful outcome that everyone working in the police Operations call-taking centre dreads: not dispatching a patrol team quick enough when a particular job turns ugly and someone's life is in danger.
In theory, it shouldn't happen because in life-threatening emergencies, almost everyone knows to dial triple zero.
But very occasionally, what starts off as simple request for police assistance via 131-444 - such as a victim of family violence worried about a disturbance outside the house at night - can quickly go bad and what had been tasked as a low-level priority three incident could become - in a heartbeat - a priority one emergency, immediate lights-and-sirens response needed.
That's why as ACT police begin their cautious roll-out of a new online reporting portal, everyone in the Operations room will be watching their computer screens for anomalies such as these - just in case.
Why? Because in the digital world, there's no way of hearing the abject fear in a victim's voice that would set alarm bells ringing for an experienced police call taker.
For instance, if the tick suddenly appears in the box for family violence on the online portal, the new system identifies urgency and sends that incident to the top of the screen for the on-duty sergeant's immediate attention.
It's a much-needed safeguard built into the system as the ACT rolls out its new $400,000 project which has been under development for three years.
Online reporting is designed to ease the rising workload experienced by the police call-taking team, with vehicle collisions, petrol drive-offs, property damage and vandalism, and well as historical sexual assaults all going online.
For years, thousands of non-urgent calls and reports to police have been made simply to obtain a reference number for an insurance claim.
Should this cautious and "soft" online rollout prove successful, burglaries and stolen cars - two time-absorbing, high-volume crime types in Canberra - are expected to be next. However, adding these crimes also brings the huge complication of what jobs would need crime scene forensics, and those that don't.
Police say online reporting will complement their existing channels. It's been in other jurisdictions for some time and in New Zealand, the 105 (ten-five) police non-emergency portal has been a huge success. In the ACT, Crime Stoppers has had an online reporting option for years.
"For my [police] members, online reporting will facilitate better decision-making in the assessment, triage and dispatch of resources," Deputy Chief Police Officer Doug Boudry said.
"It will free up our call takers to respond to more serious, time-critical matters and allow us to serve the community more efficiently."
Police have also developed a catchphrase so the pubic can better remember it: "if it's happened, click it".
"Obviously if we see a range of [criminal] matters happen in a particular area, we will dispatch a patrol," Assistant Commissioner Boudry said.
"Our forensics resources are finite so we want to make sure we dedicate those to our highest priority matters. However, if we've got a spate of minor property offences that might require forensics, we can deploy them [forensics] if we think there is value in that.
"Sometimes people just want to report the crime not for a police response but because they might need it for insurance purposes or some other process they need to go through."
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