What’s the 911?
Police response times are taking their longest in years — and New Yorkers are paying with their safety
IN addition to troubling increases in crime and disorder since 2020, another law enforcement measure should now give New Yorkers pause: police response times, which have been inching higher since 2016. However, the more-recent upticks have made what was at first a disconcerting blip into a troubling trend. Compared to January 2018, NYPD response times reported in December 2023 have risen across the board — that is, for critical (up 22%), serious (up 45.5%), and non-critical (up 28.7%) calls. The average wait time for the latter — noise complaints, loiterers and the like — is now more than 27 minutes. This is no small matter.
The recent spike in NYPD response times poses at least two significant problems.
First, it will likely contribute to the already-significant problem of underreporting — particularly as to property offenses. The longer police take to respond to a call, the lower the likelihood of a caller sticking around to make an official report. Crime analyst Jeff Asher recently provided an illustration of this using Seattle Police data. In 90% of calls that were handled in less than 15 minutes, officers were able to locate the caller. But that percentage decreased steadily as the reported response time increased, exceeding 30% for calls retoday sponded to in 180-240 minutes. As word about extended wait times gets around, expect fewer people to bother calling at all.
Second, longer response times will likely impact clearance rates — the share of reported crimes resulting in an arrest — which have fallen significantly in New York City since 2020.
As far back as the mid-1970s, policing researchers have debated the relationship between response times and arrest outcomes. Some noted that the probability of arrest was higher for calls responded to in under five minutes. Some research failed to find any effects of police travel times on arrest probability. However, a 2017 paper published in the Review of Economic Studies dug into the question anew in an attempt to identify the causal effects of longer response times. Using a unique data set from Manchester, England, they found that “a 10% increase in response time leads to a 4.6 percentage points decrease in the likelihood of clearing the crime.”
The question, then, is what can be done to get the department back to pre-pandemic response times. The answer lies in understanding what’s driving the recent increases. There are two key factors at work here: The recent reduction in the size of the NYPD, and the increase in demand for police services.
The NYPD has gone from a force of approximately 36,000 uniformed personnel in 2018 to just over 33,600 — a reduction of nearly 7%. That may seem manageable, but the impact of losing approximately 2,400 cops on response times is significant, especially since the number of calls for service has skyrocketed. Indeed, a smaller NYPD fielded a million more calls for service in 2022 (7.1 million) than it did in 2018 (6.1 million).
Officers are also having to do more in the way of compliance work, such as indexing body camera footage, and other types of paperwork, which can take them off the street for up to an hour each shift. All of this has been exacerbated by the recent uptick in street-blocking protests requiring large police responses, further constraining the NYPD’s ability to manage the 911 call volume.
There is one (obvious) way to address these realities: Hire and retain many more cops. If only it were that easy. Like other urban departments around the country, the NYPD is struggling to keep officers and recruit new ones, which is all well and good as far as the anti-police radicals on the City Council are concerned. The likelihood that folks like Tiffany Caban, Yusef Salaam and other members of the council’s “progressive” caucus will be willing to even consider the budget increases the NYPD will need to fill the response time gap is remote.
Where does that leave us? For the moment, at least, with fewer police spending more of their time jumping from call to call, and less time doing the kind of proactive enforcement that helped the department reduce crime to historic lows just five years ago. At least for now, it seems that New Yorkers are just going to have to accept that longer wait times are part of the new normal.