Response to 911 call over armed thieves took 90 minutes
On Friday morning, Emily Murphy, a UC Hastings professor, and her husband, Joe DiMento, both tweeted that DiMento had a gun pointed at him outside the couple’s home and called 911.
San Francisco police took over 90 minutes to respond — and Murphy’s tweet about the wait time quickly went viral.
DiMento explained on Twitter that he was confronting auto parts thieves outside of his bedroom window when they pointed a gun at him, but that the thieves left “immediately” after he confronted them. He said that when officers did show up nearly two hours later, they took his report that a catalytic converter had been stolen.
Murphy wrote on Twitter early Friday afternoon that their family was safe, and that they did not want to speak to the media about what happened.
The situation is the latest in a series of incidents where people have reported that SFPD was slow to respond to reported crimes or simply stood by and watched after various crimes and 911 calls.
SFPD confirmed the incident, saying that at 7:24 a.m., an officer assigned to Ingleside Station responded to the 400 block of Beacon Street on a report of a theft from a vehicle that happened around 5:10 a.m., according to the victim. Officers said that when the victim called out to stop the suspect, “the suspect pointed an unknown object at the victim which this victim believes may have been a firearm,” before fleeing in a vehicle.
Asked why the response took so long, SFPD spokesperson Kathryn Winters blamed a high volume of higher-priority calls.
“There are many factors that can affect the response time from an officer such as the number of calls for service, how dispatch has prioritized the calls, and the staffing level,” she said, explaining that 911 calls are categorized into priorities A, B and C.
Because the suspects had left by the time the victim had called 911, she said, the call was a B priority call, which means that a crime has just occurred, but there is no longer an active threat to life or safety.
She said officers were dispatched to the scene as fast as was reasonably possible based on both available staff and on A-priority call volumes — which indicate an active and immediate threat to life or safety. She was not able to immediately provide specific numbers for either call volume or staff.
“The San Francisco Police Department is committed to providing safety with respect for all in San Francisco,” she said. “We encourage anyone who thinks they are the victim of a crime to contact us so we can fully investigate the incident.”
Police Chief Bill Scott has previously blamed SFPD’s slow response times for low priority calls — ranked among the worst in the nation in a 2020 report from an outside consulting group — on low staffing.
On Wednesday, San Francisco Mayor London Breed told business leaders that she plans to push for police academy classes and investment to recruit and retain officers in the upcoming city budget.
A March analysis published by the San Francisco Police Department said that the department has almost 500 fewer personnel than it needs to perform its current duties.
A Chronicle analysis found that San Francisco was the most highly policed city in California as of 2019, the latest year with data that is comparable across cities. Though staffing levels have decreased since then, its 2022 staffing numbers still put it near the top of the list for number of police officers per resident in California.
For his part, DiMento wrote on Twitter that he was saddened to be a victim of crime in the “normally incredibly quiet and safe” neighborhood where he’s lived for five years.
“Yesterday I was telling a friend who was considering moving back to SF with his family, ‘oh yeah, it’s safe, the crime stuff is overblown,’ ” he wrote.
“Then today at 5 am I had a gun pointed at me when confronting auto parts thieves outside my bedroom window.”