Barrie residents are less likely than people in comparable Canadian communities to believe police respond quickly to calls for assistance, according to survey results presented to the Barrie Police Service Board on Thursday.
The 2026 Advanis Policing and Public Safety Survey found 55 per cent of 562 Barrie respondents agreed or strongly agreed that police respond quickly, compared with 71 per cent of respondents in similar Canadian communities with populations under 200,000.
Strategic planner Dana Stott told the board the service plans to use the results as a baseline and add a follow-up question to next year's survey to better understand residents' perceptions.
"Next year we look forward to being able to add why residents might feel this way," she said. "And we look forward to seeing those results so that we can dig deeper into the data."
Board member Arif Khan asked whether residents' perceptions of response times reflected the service's most urgent calls, including priority zero and one calls, which are considered highly harm-based in nature.
Stott's written report said most calls for service to Barrie police are classified as priority three or four, rather than the more urgent priorities zero through two.
"Because it is a random sample, there's more probability that the people who are being sampled have lower priority calls that have been coming in, therefore our responsiveness would not be as high," Stott told the board.
Chief Rich Johnston said the service is awaiting data from the Inspector General's office following its investigation into police call response times across Ontario. The data is expected sometime in the fall and could help illustrate how Barrie compares with other Ontario police services.
No other Tier 5 police services participated in the Advanis survey, limiting the service's ability to compare its results directly with those of another similarly sized police service.
London Police Service was the only other service in the report with a lower result for perceived response times, with 45 per cent of respondents agreeing that police respond quickly.
"When you look at it across the province, there may be slower response times by other organizations, but people feel better about that," Johnston told the board. "We might be providing excellent response times, but people perceive it not to be."
The survey also found Barrie residents were more likely than respondents in comparable Canadian communities to believe police exceed their authority at least sometimes.
Just 48 per cent of Barrie respondents said police rarely, almost never or never exceed their authority, the lowest proportion among the services included in the Advanis report and the only one below 50 per cent.
Notably, 35 per cent responded with a "sometimes" answer, the highest rate among the participating services, which could indicate some uncertainty with respondents.
"The 'sometimes' has that idea that well, maybe [there's] some unsureness with it," Stott told the board. "We want to probe and do an additional question next year, especially to see did they actually interact with us, with our policing, and so is this from perception or is this from actual interaction?"
Stott added the service also wants to explore those responses further in next year's survey.
Advanis conducts its annual survey between May and June and polled over 30,000 Canadians in 2026.
It also provided insight on overall support and perception of policing, effectiveness in resolving violent crime, perception of public safety, and victimization, and police spending.
