Putting a pin in this for later.
Mayor John Whitmire
City leaders blamed an increased lag in police response times in 2024, in part, on the fallout from a scandal in which 264,000 cases were suspended citing a lack of personnel.
Police leaders, past and present, said staffing has led to the increase in wait times, which this year has seen the average time for top-priority calls increase from an average of 6 to 6.2 minutes. While Houston Police Department had to reallocate resources to examine the dropped cases, Mayor John Whitmire and law enforcement experts said the rise in police response time is part of a trend that has continued for more than a decade.
The suspended cases scandal shows that what is an important customer service role for agencies in instilling public confidence by showing up to calls quickly is also a logistics problem in that prioritizing calls risks neglecting investigations, the experts said.
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Agencies like the Houston Police Department categorize calls based on their severity, with top-priority calls, including reports of a shooting or a crime in progress, all the way down to Priority 5 calls that might not require a police response.
Through September, officers responded to priority 1 calls, considered life-threatening, in an average of 6.2 minutes, compared to 6 minutes in 2023, according to Houston Police Department data. Priority 2 response times increased from 11.3 to 11.7, priority 3 from 72.4 up to 75.5; priority 4 from 91.9 up to 95.1 and priority 5 from 106.5 up to 107.7.
“It’s a constant balance of where to allocate resources,” said Jay Coons, a criminal justice professor at Sam Houston State University and a retired member of the Harris County Sheriff’s Office. “I would be concerned if a police department were targeting, say Priority 2 calls at the expense of some of those street-level tactical units.”
The uptick is the continuation of a years-long trend of officers responding to top-priority calls at the slowest rate since the 1990s, according to a Chronicle investigation. The department tries to answer those calls within an average of 4 to 6 minutes, but officers have exceeded that range multiple times in recent years, including 2024.
If the suspended cases scandal was responsible for some of the recent increase in response times, then we should see an improvement in the coming months, as those investigations are being wrapped up. I don’t know what HPD should be doing, but I’m sure there’s tons of academic research and best practices out there for them to consult and follow. What I do know, and what I’ve been saying for some time now, is that we should be getting a lot more transparency about HPD’s overall performance than we have been getting. Not just response times, but solve rates and more clarity on where their money is being spent and what we’re getting out of it. Mayor Whitmire talks a lot about waste and fraud and efficiency, but I don’t see that being applied to the single biggest item in the city’s budget. We’re going to be spending more on HPD. We should know in a lot more detail what that spending is doing for us.