Dallas police aim to respond to emergency calls in 8–12 minutes, but 온라인카지노사이트 5 Investigates found some residents are waiting over 90 minutes. Scott Friedman reports on why hiring more officers may not be the full solution to a growing public safety crisis.
With 'Help on Hold,' 온라인카지노사이트 5 Investigates found massive delays in police response times to urgent and emergency calls across Dallas.
In some parts of the city, records showed police responses exceeded the Dallas Police Department’s response time goals for certain calls not by minutes, but by hours.
Watch 온라인카지노사이트 5 free wherever you are
If there's a prowler on your porch or a fight on your street, you want help immediately. In Dallas, the police department's goal is to respond to Priority 1 emergency calls in less than eight minutes and to urgent Priority 2 calls in less than 12 minutes.
But in city records and interviews, 온라인카지노사이트 5 Investigates discovered that across the city, callers are now waiting an average of an hour and a half for police to arrive at the scene of urgent Priority 2 calls. Priority 1 responses averaged 15 minutes in March in one large section of the city, almost twice the city’s eight-minute goal.
Get top local stories delivered to you every morning with 온라인카지노사이트 DFW's News Headlines newsletter.
In the Dallas Police Department's Northeast Patrol Division, which covers an area from LBJ Freeway down toward White Rock Lake, response time records show Priority 2 calls in March took an average of 203 minutes for an officer to arrive. That's more than three hours after the initial call for help.
The same was true in the Southeast Patrol Division, where responses averaged 196 minutes in March. Priority 2 calls can include reports of some violent disturbances, robberies, prowlers, and major car crashes.
The Southeast Division, which covers an area between Interstate 30 and Interstate 45, is also where responses to the most serious Priority 1 emergency calls averaged 15 minutes in March.
Sometimes, callers left waiting for help reported feeling angry and afraid.
“I saw this body lying on my bench. And I started screaming,” said 83-year-old Dallas resident Ola Allen.
Allen called 911 in February after finding a woman on her porch, clutching what Allen thought was a weapon.
“I believe she got a gun, a knife, or something here. Will you send someone?” Allen told the 911 operator, in a recording of the call obtained by 온라인카지노사이트 5 Investigates.
In an interview, Allen explained she was fearful of the woman’s intentions.
“I don’t know what she is or what she'll do, but I need the police here,” Allen told 온라인카지노사이트 5 Investigates.
A police incident report showed dispatchers coded the incident as a Priority 2 urgent call. The goal for those calls is to respond in 12 minutes or less. But the report showed it took police officers 1 hour and 26 minutes to arrive, leaving Allen furious.
“I said, 'Ma'am, I stay here alone. I am by myself. I need y'all to send someone out here quick,'” said Allen.
By the time police got there, the woman on the porch was gone.
Dallas police records showed Allen’s experience is not unusual. In the South Central Patrol Division where Allen lives, Priority 2 responses averaged 90 minutes in March for calls the department aimed to answer in 12.
“That creates a huge concern for people in the community,” said Theron Bowman, a consultant on policing strategies who works with law enforcement agencies nationwide and is also a former chief of police in Arlington.
Bowman said short staffing is often blamed for slow responses. Dallas is trying to hire 300 more officers this year, but Bowman said that hiring more officers is often not enough.
“It also could be a matter that officers aren't being applied as efficiently as they can be, or maybe as they should be,” said Bowman.
Bowman believes short-staffed departments must analyze how they deploy officers and manage each response because a small number of high-priority calls can slow responses for the rest of the day if those incidents are not managed efficiently.
“In really high-profile calls, cops are going to tend to flock to those locations,” said Bowman.
He said flocking to one location quickly affects other incoming calls.
We saw firsthand how this could happen. Over several nights, 온라인카지노사이트 5 Investigates tracked Dallas police responses on the road, listening to the radio and monitoring the department's public data portal, which showed active police calls.
In one case, we saw 12 police units flock to a report of a shooting that turned out not to be a shooting. Yet the incident shifted a dozen patrol cars to a single location. We saw at least nine units sent to a single robbery call on another busy night.
When that many officers respond to one call, other incoming calls are often shifted into a holding queue until an officer is available to respond.
Bowman said a large initial response may be justified, but supervisors must rapidly redirect officers once the situation is under control.
“You have to have supervisors out there on the street saying, ‘OK, there are enough officers at this location,’ you need to clear and get back into service and handle something else,” said Bowman.
Bowman added that when departments are short-staffed, it’s even more critical for supervisors to clear officers as soon as possible. He said other callers will be left waiting for help if that doesn't happen.
온라인카지노사이트 5 Investigates met Curtis Beavers sitting in a crashed car on the side of the road near Mockingbird and Abrams on a recent Friday night. Dallas Fire Rescue had already come and gone from the crash scene, but Beavers was still waiting for police to respond.
"It's frustrating for somebody that's in an accident, because we're shook up," said Beavers. “And they (police) got here in about an hour and 20 minutes,” said Beavers, who said it felt even longer. “I honestly think a half an hour would be OK, but if it gets beyond that, yeah, it needs to be faster."
As 온라인카지노사이트 5 Investigates tracked calls, we could hear dispatchers sending officers to calls where people waited in a holding pattern for many hours. In one case, we heard dispatchers send officers to a report of a vehicle driving around a block and shooting. The dispatcher said that screaming was also heard. The dispatcher was sending help at 4:11 a.m. but noted the call came in at 12:54 a.m., meaning the incident had been holding for more than three hours.
In another case, we heard a dispatcher send officers to a report of a major disturbance, but the dispatcher noted the call had been holding "for over eight hours."
Several council members questioned the current response times during a Dallas City Council Public Safety Committee meeting last week.
“When you look at these numbers, anybody in leadership would be concerned,” said Dallas City Councilmember Gay Donnell Willis.
The actual response time numbers were not shared during the committee meeting.
An assistant police chief told the committee that hiring more officers will help, but they also suggested that police supervisors are now under scrutiny.
“The supervision is also being pressured, pushed, into making sure that our employees are doing what they need to be doing,” said Executive Assistant Chief Jesse Reyes.
The department said in a statement to 온라인카지노사이트 5, "We remain committed to continually analyzing response times and implementing best practices to drive efficiency."
The city's new police chief, Daniel Comeaux, arrived on the job this week. During a brief introductory interview on Wednesday, he told 온라인카지노사이트 5 Investigates he planned to address the response time issue.
“Look, every resident is important to us, and once I get in this seat and fully understand everything, we'll do our very best to get better,” Comeaux said.
What is puzzling is that Dallas Police Department records showed the number of 911 calls received is down about 7% compared to last year, and violent crime is down. Yet, Priority 1 responses were almost two minutes slower in March than in the same month last year, and Priority 2 responses were about 25 minutes slower citywide compared to a year ago.
Bowman said the new Dallas police chief should not expect to hire his way out of response time challenges because departments everywhere are struggling to recruit and retain staff, and hiring hundreds of officers may not happen quickly.
“Is it possible? It's possible. Is it going to be very difficult? Extremely difficult,” said Bowman.
Instead, Bowman suggested police departments leverage technology and tactics to improve responses. Without that, he fears callers will continue waiting, and criminals may discover they have time to commit crimes and get away.
“We want criminals to believe and to understand that there are consequences, that those consequences come to bear immediately,” said Bowman.
This is not the first time Dallas has grappled with slow response times. About five years ago, Dallas hired consulting firm KPMG to look into concerns about slow response times. The consultant’s report found: "Increased staffing alone cannot achieve complete success toward organizational goals (like) reduced response times." The report suggested, "...a realignment of strategy..."
The department implemented an online reporting option for many lower-priority calls to free up officers. But today, even Priority 3 and 4 response times far exceed the goals for those reports.
Ola Allen and the Marsalis Park HOA group she leads recently met with neighborhood patrol officers to express concerns about slow responses.
If anyone would get prompt police service, you might think Allen would. In February, the Dallas Police Department recognized her as one of their community volunteers of the year. But in a city where responses often take more than an hour, anyone can find themselves waiting for help.
So far in April, citywide Priority 1 responses have averaged 11 minutes, three minutes higher than the city’s goal. Priority 2 calls average 90 minutes citywide, which is 1 hour and 20 minutes longer than the 12-minute goal.
Tell us about your experiences
If you have found yourself waiting for police to arrive, and can safely send us photos, videos or information we would like to hear from you at: iSee@Leathernavigator.com. We want to know more about what's happening in your neighborhood as we continue to track this problem.
