This is a great question which really gets into the grey areas of both policing and how civilians view the 911 system, but the answer to the question you asked is pretty simple.

tl;dr: if you ever believe that your life or property is at immediate risk, or there is a risk of personal injury, call 911. You pay taxes. You are there. We are not. You've assessed the situation and decided you need immediate help? Call 911.

In reality, people will call 911 for more than just life and death matters. So our website says that you should call it for "emergencies". As you can imagine the definition of that word varies widely depending on who you are speaking to.

Our description provided to the public is:

An emergency includes those situations when lives are at risk or there is severe bodily injury, the loss or destruction of property is at risk, or a crime is in progress or has just occurred.

We tell people the admin line should be used for a non-emergency. Once again, we describe it as:

A non-emergency consists of the sharing of crime and disorder information with police, or an incident that requires police assistance but not an immediate police response because: lives are not at risk and there are no bodily injuries; the identified crime or disorder has occurred in the past and there is no immediate threat to person or property.

Unfortunately, a lot of people don't realize that there is almost no difference between the 911 line and the admin line. They are not staffed by a lower level of calltakers: the people you talk to on the admin line are the same people as on the 911 line. They calls received on that line go out to the same officers and their priorities are set according to the information that was given, not the line it came in on.

The only tangible differences are these: 1) we get more caller data from a 911 call and 2) if a communicator is speaking to you on an admin line and the 911 line rings, it is possible that the communicator may place you on hold to answer the 911 line. That's it.

We treat every 911 call as a life and death situation until proven otherwise. We tell people to call on admin because we want the person who literally cannot wait to speak to someone immediately.

If you feel that's you, you should absolutely call 911. But if you feel the situation is not as urgent, you will get the same service calling 905-825-4777.

For those still reading, here is our page that talks about what kind of calls should be handled by the Emergency Line (911), Non-Emergency Line and by calling the front desk of your local division: https://www.haltonpolice.ca/about/contact/index.php