What is the police response time now?
I can tell you we’re doing much, much better than we were two years ago. The average response time for a priority 1 call, which is an emergency – the intruder is here now sort of thing – is 15 minutes. The average response time for a priority 2 call – where the crime has been committed and there is no pending danger – is 54 minutes, which is down from last year. But we need to be fair, here. In all reality, we were about 100 officers short two-and-a-half years ago. Today, we are basically fully staffed at 741 officers. Now, we lose about one or two a week to retirements. The mayor has been very true to his word: two classes of new officers a year, and that is making the difference. Now when we get that quality of life call, we’re getting there a lot quicker and we can spend more time there. And we can leave that call on a very positive note, which is so important. But we needed to be fully staffed because a call for one shooting may tie up 10 to 15 officers. People used to join the pol
