THUNDER BAY — The Thunder Bay Police Service Communications Centre has launched a new text message program that enhances how 911 operators connect with the community.
“This is a huge benefit to the public for making sure that they’re kept up to date on their call for service,” said TBPS communications manager Megan Petzel.
She said this program allows communications centre staff to deliver guidance for things like a list of available tow truck companies, notification advising callers that their request has been forwarded to the TBPS callback unit, or vehicle collision self‑reporting instructions with a direct link.
“If someone has called 911 and it’s not a 911 issue, it’s not an immediate threat to life or property or it’s not an immediate crime in progress, we can provide these links to them to report online so we’re not tying up our patrol officers taking a report that can be done online,” said Petzel.
“The public can’t respond to the messages we send, so it’s not a two-way text message,” said Petzel. “Once we’ve sent it, if they did need to contact the police they would do so as they would before, call 911 to speak to an operator or 807-684-1200 for non-emergencies.”
Petzel said this is an extension of a program the TBPS is already running.
“We were running a program called the Rubi Report which is basically giving us the ability to send links to cell phones. So if (a caller) wanted to report a non-in-progress crime, say a threat or a theft or a mischief to their property, we could send them a link directly to their cell phone that they would be able to click on that would send them to our online reporting system and it would walk the caller through filing the online report.”
She said the previous system allowed the Police Service to send a link in cases of reporting a non-emergency request for service, but now they can also “send messages with information, so if there’s a need to contact the hospital (for example) we can send them a link with all the information on contacting switchboard or emerge.”
Basically, she said that this is a system that makes use of available technology. “Instead of saying, get pen and paper, we give you the numbers to write down. This is just us sending them that message so that they have it to refer to.”
She said this enhanced system helps streamline reports going to where they should be going, “so we’re only sending our frontline officers to those in-progress, high-priority calls and it’s freeing up our officers to be able to respond quicker to those and it’s allowing the public to get their reports taken quickly so they’re doing that online report, within minutes of receiving that link, instead of waiting days sometimes for an officer to take it for them from the road.”
The new system doesn’t prevent operators from doing things the old way, Petzel said. “We would have the ability to know when it wouldn’t be necessarily a good thing to use. So if we have a person calling, they’re using a landline, for example, we’d see that on our phone display that they’re calling from a landline and then we would just walk them through how we did before we had this technology.”
By Carrie Ivardi, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
Original Published on Apr 09, 2026 at 12:24
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