The number is (801) 852-6210, and the single most useful thing to know about it is that it is not a lesser service.
It rings the Provo City Communication Center — the same dispatch floor, staffed by the same dispatchers, that answers 911 for the city. The center runs twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year. Calling the non-emergency line at 2 a.m. does not reach an answering machine or a message that tells you to call back Monday.
That misconception costs people two different ways. Some hesitate to call at all after hours, assuming nobody is there. Others dial 911 for a barking dog because they assume it is the only line that works at night. Both are wrong, and the second one occupies a 911 call-taker who may be about to receive something urgent.
The line that decides which number to use
The test is not how serious the thing is in the abstract. It is whether it can get worse while you explain it.
A crime in progress, a threat to anyone's safety, a fire, a medical emergency, a crash with injuries — all 911, without hesitation. Something that already finished, where nobody is hurt and no suspect is standing there, is the non-emergency line.
The clean illustration is a burglary. Someone is in your house right now: 911. You came home and found a window broken and a laptop gone: (801) 852-6210. Same crime, different clock.
Where people get into trouble is the middle: the suspicious person who has not done anything yet, the car that has circled the block four times, the argument next door that is getting louder. Those lean toward 911, because each one is a situation that could turn. Dispatchers are trained to downgrade a call that turns out to be minor. They cannot upgrade a call you never made.
What the non-emergency line is actually good for
In practice, the calls that belong on it fall into a few families.
Cold property crime — theft, vandalism, a break-in discovered after the fact. Noise complaints, which in a city with this many student rentals are a substantial share of the volume. Parking problems on private property. Animal complaints. Abandoned vehicles. Non-injury crashes on private property. Follow-up questions about a report you already filed. Requests for an officer to come to the front counter.
It is also the correct number when you are simply unsure. "I don't know if this is a police matter" is a legitimate opening sentence, and dispatchers hear it constantly. They will route you, including routing you out of the police department entirely if what you actually need is code compliance or public works.
311 is a different thing, and it is often the right thing
A large share of what people call the police about is not a police matter. Overgrown weeds, junk in a yard, a streetlight out, a pothole, a missed garbage pickup, over-occupancy in a rental — none of those are dispatch calls.
Provo runs 311 for city services inside city limits, with (801) 852-6000 as the equivalent from outside. Code Compliance, which handles property maintenance, junk storage and over-occupancy, sits in Development Services at (801) 852-6427 and takes reports online.
Using the right door matters more than it sounds. A code complaint routed through dispatch arrives as a note; the same complaint filed with Code Compliance enters a process with an inspector and a file. If the neighboring yard has been a problem for eight months, the second path is the one that produces a record.
Filing online, and why the case number is the point
Provo's online reporting system handles several categories of non-violent incident where nothing is in progress and there is no suspect information to act on. You submit, and the system issues a case number and lets you print a copy for free.
The case number is usually the actual objective. An insurer processing a stolen-laptop claim, a landlord documenting damage, a bank disputing a fraudulent charge, a university replacing a stolen ID — all of them want a case number, and most of them do not want the narrative at all. Getting that number at midnight from your kitchen table, rather than by waiting for an officer who is legitimately busy with things that are still happening, is the entire value of the system.
Two constraints are worth reading before you start. If your incident type is not on the list, the form will stop you and direct you to the phone line — the categories are deliberately narrow. And every submitted report is reviewed by a person. If further investigation is warranted you may be contacted, and filing a false report is a criminal offense, stated plainly on the form.
What the dispatcher will ask, and the order they ask it
Callers frequently open with the story. Dispatchers need the logistics first, and knowing the sequence shortens the call considerably.
Location comes before everything, including what happened. An address, a cross street, a building name, a landmark — anything that puts a unit somewhere. Dispatch can send help to an incomplete story; it cannot send help to an unknown place. If you are calling from a phone with a Utah County area code about something in another city, say the city early, because the number does not tell them where you are standing.
Then: what happened, when, whether anyone is hurt, whether anyone involved is still there, and descriptions if there are people or vehicles to describe. Direction of travel is disproportionately valuable and disproportionately forgotten.
Expect to be asked for a callback number and your name. You can decline to give a name in most circumstances and the call still gets handled, but an anonymous report limits follow-up, and it usually means no case number for you afterward.
Fraud and scams often are not a Provo police matter
This is the single most common misrouted call, and the answer is genuinely unsatisfying.
A scam run from another state or another country, where money moved electronically and the person on the other end is a fiction, is not something a city police department can investigate to a conclusion. Provo will take a report — and you should file one, because the case number is what your bank and your card issuer will ask for — but the investigative reality is that jurisdiction sits elsewhere.
The venues that matter for internet-enabled fraud are federal: the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center for online fraud, and the Federal Trade Commission for identity theft, which generates a recovery plan alongside the report. For a fraudulent charge or a compromised account, the fastest useful call is to your bank, not to dispatch, and it should happen before anything else.
Where local police genuinely help is anything with a physical footprint in Provo: a person who came to your door, a vehicle you can describe, a package intercepted, a local address where money was handed over. If any part of the scam touched the physical city, say so, because that is the part an officer can actually work.
Records is a different office with a different number
This trips people up constantly. The number you call to report something is not the number you call to obtain the paperwork afterward.
The Records Office is at (801) 852-6231, inside the department's Operational Support Division. Records specialists answer general inquiries, bring officers to the front counter, provide paperwork through GRAMA, conduct criminal history clearances on request, and act as notary.
That last item is a small, genuinely useful fact. If you need something notarized and are already at the police department for another reason, the notary is there. Utah caps notarial fees by statute regardless of who performs the act, which is covered in our guide to getting something notarized in Provo.
GRAMA, briefly and honestly
Utah's Government Records Access and Management Act is the mechanism for obtaining a copy of a report. Provo takes police GRAMA requests through its own form, separate from the general city GRAMA form and separate again from fire records.
Three expectations worth setting. First, it is not instant — the statute gives agencies a response window, and complex requests take longer than simple ones. Second, an open investigation changes everything; records tied to an active case are routinely withheld or heavily redacted, and that is the statute operating as written rather than an obstruction. Third, fees can attach to staff time, and Provo's city code addresses employee time spent responding to records requests directly.
If you are a party to the incident — the victim, the reporting person, the driver in the crash — say so in the request. It does not guarantee release, but it changes the classification analysis.
Crash reports live somewhere slightly different
A traffic crash generates a report, and where that report ends up depends on who worked the collision. A crash on a city street inside Provo is generally Provo Police; on the interstate or a state route it may be the Utah Highway Patrol; on campus it may be BYU Police.
Some Utah agencies route crash-report purchases through third-party commercial portals rather than through their own records counter, which means the report you want may not be where you first look. If you are not certain which agency worked the crash or which portal holds the document, the Records line at (801) 852-6231 is the shortcut. Ask before you pay a portal for a search.
Insurers usually need the report number sooner than the report itself, and the officer at the scene should have given you a card with it.
BYU has its own police department, and jurisdiction is real
BYU operates a sworn police department covering university property. This is not campus security in the private-guard sense; it is a police agency.
The practical consequence shows up most often with stolen bikes, which are among the most commonly reported campus property crimes anywhere. Provo's own online reporting form explicitly routes bicycle theft on BYU property to BYU Police. File it with the wrong agency and the report does not vanish, but it does acquire a handoff and a delay — and bike recovery is a serial-number game where the first few days matter.
The same logic applies to UVU in Orem, which is a different city with a different police department entirely. Orem Police, not Provo Police, and a UVU-specific campus overlay on top of that. Students who live in one city and study in another routinely misfile.
Nobody in Provo goes to a Provo jail
There isn't one. Everyone arrested in Provo is booked into the Utah County jail in Spanish Fork, run by the Sheriff's Office, which is a structural fact that surprises most people looking for someone after an arrest.
If you are trying to locate a person, the search, the booking delay and the visitation rules are covered in our guide to finding someone in the Utah County jail. The police department cannot tell you much beyond confirming an arrest occurred, and the delay between an arrest on a Provo street and a name appearing in the county's search tool is normal rather than a sign of a problem.
Which court the resulting case lands in is a separate question with a non-obvious answer, laid out in our explainer on the Utah County courts.
Property: describing the thing is the whole skill
The department holds a standing inventory of found and seized property — bikes, identification, backpacks, purses and wallets, clothing, phones, vehicle parts, cameras, discs, jewelry, keys, weapons, electronics, skateboards, scooters, cash and miscellaneous items.
The Property Division answers at (801) 852-6246 during weekday business hours, and the instruction attached to it is the important part: you must be able to describe the property in detail.
That is not bureaucratic caution. A university city generates an extraordinary volume of near-identical black backpacks and silver laptops. "A black North Face backpack" identifies nothing. A serial number, an engraving, a specific sticker, a torn strap, the contents of an interior pocket — those identify something. Photograph the serial numbers on your bike and your laptop now, before you need them.
Safe exchange zones, and what they actually do
Provo designates the front and rear of City Hall as safe areas for child custody exchanges and property handovers, including the online-marketplace sale that you would rather not conduct in a stranger's driveway. Both locations are well lit and covered by camera surveillance.
Understand what is on offer. The protection is the lighting and the cameras and the fact that the location is a municipal building — not a police escort. Nobody meets you, nothing is scheduled, and no officer supervises the handover.
For a custody exchange under a court order, the order controls. Choosing a safer location is sensible; it does not modify the terms a judge set, and it does not create a witness.
The complaint and commendation channel
The department maintains a public channel for suggestions, commendations and complaints about officer conduct. It is a separate mechanism from dispatch and from records, and it is the correct route for a concern about how an interaction went.
Officer-involved shootings sit outside it entirely: those are investigated by the Utah County Attorney's Office under a published protocol, deliberately so that no agency reviews its own use of force. Expect the department to say very little about the substance of such a case while that review is open.
If your concern is about a city policy rather than an individual interaction — patrol priorities, enforcement patterns in a particular neighborhood, the police budget — the venue is the City Council, and our guide to following the Provo City Council covers how to actually get heard there.
The numbers, in one place
- Emergency: 911
- Police non-emergency dispatch: (801) 852-6210 — staffed 24/7/365
- Police Records / GRAMA / criminal history clearances: (801) 852-6231
- Found and seized property: (801) 852-6246, weekday business hours
- City services (inside city limits): 311
- City services (from outside city limits): (801) 852-6000
- Zoning and Code Compliance: (801) 852-6427
- Police Department address: 445 W Center Street, Suite 130, Provo, UT 84601
Save the non-emergency number in your phone now rather than searching for it during the thing that made you want it. Phone numbers and office hours change; the police department's own pages are the authority if a listing anywhere disagrees with what you read here.
Related Guides
- Finding Someone in the Utah County Jail
- The Utah County Courts, Explained
- Following the Provo City Council
- Getting Something Notarized in Provo
- Utah Renters' Rights
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Provo police non-emergency number?
When should I call 911 instead?
Can I file a Provo police report online?
How do I get a copy of a police report in Provo?
My bike was stolen at BYU. Who do I report it to?
Who investigates an officer-involved shooting in Provo?
Where do I go to exchange custody of a child or hand over something I sold online?
I lost something in Provo. Does the police department have it?