New Orleans And The Case For Civilianization

How New Orleans dramatically improved response times despite a smaller police force.

Not a ton has gone right in New Orleans in the last few years.

The city had the nation’s highest murder rate in 2022 as the number of murders increased an astounding 120 percent between 2019 and 2022. The city's population has shrunk by 7 percent since 2019 and the police department has lost 22 percent of its officers over that span. And, possibly worst of all, the Saints haven’t made the playoffs since 2020 while going 5-12 last year with this year not looking particularly great.

One thing that went particularly badly in New Orleans between 2019 and 2022 was police response times driven by the smaller police force. The average response time to New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) Calls for Service in November 2019 was 43 minutes, but it began ticking up in the ensuing months. By April 2023 the average response time had ballooned to an incredible 180 minutes.

Police are called on to respond to all sorts of incidents, ranging from murders to lost wallets. Surging response times in New Orleans though was not just confined to less critical non-emergency incidents as the average response time to emergency calls increased from around 14 minutes in late 2019 to more than 40 minutes in April 2023.

Median response times show large increases as well, from 10.6 minutes in 2019 to 58.4 minutes in April 2023, so it’s not just an outlier-driven increase. The share of emergencies with a response of greater than 60 minutes increased from 3.3 percent in 2019 to over 15 percent in April 2023.

Longer response times had life and death consequences. Crimes went underreported and victims went unsupported.

But then something pretty great happened, something that should be seen as a model for other cities struggling with fewer police officers and longer response times.

Response times fell.

A lot.

Quickly.

NOPD had 925 commissioned police officers in April 2023 and 895 in September 2024, yet the city’s average response time fell from 180 minutes in April 2023 to 53 in September 2024.

The cause of the big decline in response times isn’t hard to deduce. April 2023 was when the City of New Orleans hired a private contractor to respond to non-injury traffic accidents. New Orleans piloted a program with contractor On-Scene Services (OSS)¹ in 2022 with the contractor handling around 25 non-injury accidents per week in 2022 (topping out at 3% of all non-injury accidents citywide).

That pilot program ended in December 2022 and it took a few months to get a more complete program launched in the spring of 2023. The share of non-injury accidents handled by OSS has increased since then with OSS handling more than 35 percent of non-injury accidents by mid-2024 (I only have data through May 2024).

Decreasing the number of incidents NOPD had to respond to helped to bring the average NOPD response time to non-injury traffic accidents to nearly even with OSS’s (note that OSS only responded to 41 accidents in Feb/Mar 2022 which leaves the average prone to outsized outlier influence, and OSS didn’t respond to any calls from Dec 2022 to Feb 2023). In other words, NOPD having to respond to fewer traffic accidents helped make their response to traffic accidents much faster.

Hiring a contractor isn’t the only thing New Orleans has done to reduce response times. The city began hiring many more civilians in 2023 and 2024 to handle incidents that don’t require a physical police response and carry out tasks that don’t need a commissioned officer. NOPD hired 67 civilians in 2022, 140 in 2023, and 82 in 2024 increasing the number of civilians on staff from 199 in 2022 to 328 in 2024.

As a result, the share of all non-self initiated Calls for Service handled over the phone by civilians in the department’s Alternative Police Response (APR) increased from 5.6 percent in 2022 to nearly 8 percent by mid-2024.

And more civilians has enabled the number of incidents being handled online to double (though it is still small overall). This can be seen in NOPD’s Electronic Police Report data.

Lower response times are associated with higher clearance rates while higher response times lead to poor crime reporting and lower community trust. I like to think of response times as a thermometer measuring a department’s health, and the temperature in New Orleans has improved dramatically since mid-2023 (the ambient temperature right now is very hot though).

NOPD’s approach to reducing response times should serve as an important lesson for other cities. Not only does the success stand out, but so too does the fact that a dramatic improvement was accomplished without a larger police force. Indeed, what fascinates me is how little action was necessary to have a major impact on response times.

There are tons of cities that should take notice.

The average response time in Austin has risen from 29 minutes in 2019 to 47 minutes in 2024. Response times in Seattle have risen from 51 minutes to 90 minutes, and response times for all kinds of calls have risen substantially between 2020 and 2025 in Dallas.

Just to name a few.

The average response time in New Orleans in 2025 is just over an hour and has risen a little in recent months. You could argue that it’s still too high though it is down by 120 minutes in since 2023. There’s undoubtedly more that New Orleans can do to reduce response times, but the city’s success over the last couple of years strongly suggests that future improvements will come from increased efficiency and more civilianization rather than from trying (and probably failing) to grow through recruiting more officers.

1. Full disclosure, my company has done work analyzing supporting the contractor’s efforts in a different city.