Kelowna RCMP response time for low priority calls slowed as mischief rose in 2025

The Kelowna RCMP’s response time to low priority calls slowed down over the course of 2025 as petty crimes like mischief and bike theft rose.

The RCMP is presenting its annual report to city council on Monday, Feb. 9, and it shows a mixed bag of results.

Mischief rose in 2025 by 15 per cent up to 1,908 offences from 1,659 in 2024 and 1,777 in 2022.

Bike theft was up by 23 per cent with 377 offences in 2025 from 306 in 2024, but that’s down from 609 in 2022.

Kelowna RCMP’s response time to priority one calls is eight minutes, slightly faster than 2024. For priority two calls it takes police 13.7 minutes to respond, which is down from 15.9 minutes in 2022 but up from 13.1 minutes in 2024.

Priority three calls, the lowest priority, had a 35.4 minute response time in 2025, which is up 20 per cent from 29.5 minutes in 2024, but better than 44.1 minutes in 2022.

An increase in mischief and slower response from police to low priority calls matches up with the complaints made by downtown Kelowna business owners and activists in Rutland.

Downtown restaurant owner Eric Lee previously told iNFOnews.ca it can take the RCMP two hours to respond to a low priority call like dining and dashing, or a broken window.

The RCMP report said that a large part of the increase in mischief was due to the social disorder downtown.

Kelowna RCMP’s officer in charge Supt. Chris Goebel said that police have to manage priorities, but it is diverting more officers to handle mischief and disorder downtown.

“Resources are always a thing that we’re triaging and managing,” Goebel said at a public forum on Jan. 27. “We pulled a number of resources from some of those other priorities into enhanced foot patrols, into extra patrols in cars, working with our bylaw services.”

Property offences in general stayed roughly flat between 2024 and 2025 with 9,201 offences last year. But that’s an 18 per cent improvement from 11,227 offences in 2022.

Violent crime stayed relatively flat compared to 2024 with a 0.8 per cent decrease, but it’s up 6.5 per cent from 2022. A few violent crimes went up like robberies increasing by 17 per cent from 93 in 2024 to 109 in 2025.

Intimate partner violence in Kelowna has seen one of the biggest increases over the past few years with 592 offences in 2022 and 828 offences in 2025.

While crime statistics show trends in offences and policing, criminologist Dr. Melissa Munn previously told iNFOnews.ca they aren’t perfect. She said it’s hard to rely on numbers collected over a short period of time that only reflect the number of offences since there are so many variables in policing and crime.

“One of the things we know about the crime statistics is they’re not really a very accurate representation of what’s actually happening,” she said. “Sometimes we see new initiatives that come in and they may have an impact on crime statistics two years from now. More longitudinal data, like crime statistics over a 10-year period, is more reflective.”