Police repeatedly fail response time goals
Audit indicates need for more officers, police, city officials say
Twice, vandals broke into his business, shattered windows and stole his cash register. Once, a man harassed him, his workers and customers and refused to leave his establishment. Another time, thieves smashed into his truck and made off with $10,000 in earnings he had inside.
In all of these instances, Marco Hernández, the owner of Mariscos Costa Alegre Restaurant in San Jose’s Luna Park neighborhood, said officers were slow to respond to his 911 calls, taking more than an hour in most cases.
“I used to always try to call the police, but now I feel like I’m just wasting my time,” he said. “The only help I get from police and 911 is when weapons are around.”
When shots were fired into the air during an altercation last summer outside of his business, officers were on the scene within minutes.
The explanation? While San Jose officers in recent years have cut down the time it takes them to respond to the city’s most pressing emergencies, their response to slightly less serious calls has slipped, according to city records.
San Jose Police Department’s ongoing failure to meet its own response time goals was recently spelled out in detail in the city auditor’s latest Annual Report of City Services, which was released last month, prompting police and city officials to continue their decadelong drumbeat for increasing the number of officers patrolling the city.
According to the new report, the department’s response times for Priority 1 calls, which are routinely reserved for shootings, murders and major felony
incidents, on average last year took about 7 minutes, dropping from a high of 8.5 minutes in 2006-07. The department’s goal is to get to those calls within 6 minutes — a target it hasn’t hit since 2009-10, according to city reports.
In comparison, Priority 2 calls, which typically involve criminal assaults, burglaries or other incidents where a suspect is still on the scene, lag much further behind. On average, officers last year took 21 minutes to respond to these calls — more than double the department’s target of 11 minutes, the audit shows.
The only time in recent years that the department came close to meeting its Priority 2 target was in
2007- 08, when it averaged 11.4 minutes, according to city records.
San Jose police Sgt. Christian Camarillo ascribes the delayed response times to a combination of factors, including understaffing, challenges in hiring new police officers and the city’s expansive footprint.
Over the past decade, the number of sworn officers in the city’s police force has dropped 16% — from 1,374 officers in 2009-10 to 1,149 last year, according to annual city audits. Meanwhile, the population of San Jose has grown by at least 7% and emergency calls in the city have nearly doubled.
“What I will tell you is that we’re doing the very best we can, given our call volume and staffing,” Camarillo said.
The police department is constantly looking for more recruits, but the city’s high
cost of living and certain job qualifications can pose barriers, according to Camarillo. It’s also difficult to hire enough officers to outpace the number of officers retiring from the force each year, he said.
The average officer-to-resident ratio in cities across the nation is 2.4 officers per 1,000 residents, according to the FBI. In the Bay Area, San Francisco has a ratio of about 2.54 officers per 1,000 residents, Oakland has 1.85 and San Jose has about 1.17, according to city figures.
Mayor Sam Liccardo, a vocal opponent to recent calls from community activists to defund the city’s police department, said the delayed response times demonstrated both a need for more officers and “the problem of defunding a police department that’s already the most thinly staffed of any
major city in the nation.”
But Raj Jayadev, a community activist and longtime director of San Josebased Silicon Valley De-Bug, said the findings outlined in the new report indicate the opposite in his eyes.
“To me, that means that we’re investing our resources in the wrong strategies,” Jayadev said. “Defunding the police isn’t simply about taking away, it’s about reinvesting in other frameworks and actually speaking to what could be sustainable solutions, like addressing poverty and health care.”
Aside from attempting to address staffing levels, the police department has also made some procedural changes in recent years aimed at deploying officers more efficiently.
San Jose divides up its expansive city limits into 17 police districts and a cer
tain number of officers are assigned to each.
In the past, if a Priority 2 call came into a district during an ongoing response to a Priority 1 call, the Priority 2 caller would be forced to wait until an officer in that same district was available to respond. About two years ago, the department amended its protocols to allow for officers in neighboring districts to respond to the other district’s Priority 2 calls if officers there were tied up with a more major call for service.
The new protocol has yet to make an impact in reducing Priority 2 response times, according to city records, but the department is hopeful that it will over time.
While some San Jose residents and business owners such as Hernández are fed up with the department’s delayed responses to calls, others are more understanding.
When a drunken driver last summer totaled Rosalinda Aguilar’s car, which was parked on the street outside of her home, and then ran away on foot, it took officers about 45 minutes to show up at her house, she said. But Aguilar, president of the Guadalupe Washington Neighborhood Association, said she just drank a cup of coffee and waited.
“If they’re out taking care of Priority 1 calls, then that’s what they need to do,” she said. “I think they do everything they can considering.”
Hernández, on the other hand, has taken it upon himself to better protect against future crime and burglaries by recently erecting a fence around the perimeter of his business’s property.
“You feel like (the police) do nothing,” he said, “so then you have to do something.”