Police Response to Crime Calls Slows to 9 Minutes

It took the police an average of 9.1 minutes in the last year to respond to calls about crimes in progress according to the Mayor’s Management Report released yesterday, reports the New York Post. The response time slowed by 42 seconds from the previous year.

Paul Browne, the NYPD’s chief spokesman, attributed the latest increase to a spike in non-critical calls that drove up the overall average. Response times to critical calls, such as a robbery in progress or a man with a gun, remained flat at 4.6 minutes.

“We don’t respond to them as quickly,” Browne said of the noncritical calls, which he identified as complaints where there’s no immediate threat of injury such as trespassing or graffiti.”

Complaints about a slow and ineffectual police responses to crimes have been made numerous times in this neighborhood for much of the last year. Response times of a half hour have been reported by neighbors. For crimes such as car break-ins, response times of up to three hours have been reported in this blog’s comment section. Several neighbors say that even after waiting several hours on crimes such as break-ins and assaults, no police responded.

It should also be noted that in a recent iPhone mugging on Ditmas Avenue, the police responded in about eight or nine minutes according to neighbor Alexandra, putting them within the stated average.

That said, we only have a small number of crimes reported to us at this blog. What’s your experience been with police response times in emergencies and non-emergency situations?