Police Response Times May Be Improving

Though they're still pretty bad, at least in the cities with available data.

I write a lot about police response times because I think they matter. Research suggests that faster response times are associated with higher clearance rates (though that relationship isn’t firmly established). Beyond that, there’s clear evidence when reviewing Calls for Service data that longer response times lead to fewer incidents being successfully reported to law enforcement.

At its most extreme, longer response times can have serious life and death consequences for people seeking help. The impact of longer response times can be clearly seen in the below graph charting the share of incidents that weren’t successfully reported based on their disposition on the Y-axis and the response time in minutes along the X-axis. Fewer reported crimes may mean services for a crime victim go undelivered leading to a potentially tragic result sometime in the future.

The main challenge with evaluating response times is a lack of standardization in what gets reported by whom. Some agencies publish response time reports of varying quality, some agencies publish Calls for Service with calculated response times for each incident, and some agencies publish nothing at all.

Back in early 2023 I grabbed data from 15 law enforcement agencies that published their Calls for Service data online with enough details to derive response times. This found generally increasing response times through the end of 2022 in the agencies with data.

Police Are Taking Longer To Respond

It has been 2.5 years since I first wrote that piece, so I decided to revisit the problem in as many agencies as I could and see what the data shows today. I standardized the analysis by only analyzing incidents with a response time greater than 0 and less than 24 hours to weed out outliers and non-responses. The numbers might differ a bit from what I found in 2023, likely due to slightly different methodologies, but the trends should be consistent.

There still aren’t a ton of cities that publish Calls for Service data with response times, but the results for the cities I could find are below:

First, the caveats.

Calculating response times in this way is imprecise, this is only a small handful of agencies chosen solely because their data was available, the year is only halfway through so these changes could reverse, there are other — perfectly valid — means of evaluating response times beyond just averaging them, and some of the changes for cities are pretty small.

All of those caveats established, there are 14 agencies with response time data including 12 with response time data each year from 2019 to 2025 (Mesa and Tucson were included when I did the exercise in 2023 but don’t have comparable data anymore, Austin and Little Rock were added this go around). Of those 14 agencies, 12 have data covering every year from 2019 to 2025 (NYC’s data covers only Q1 2025).

Also, this is only a few agencies. Maybe the trends are totally different in other big agencies! I doubt it given the near uniformity of staffing challenges in big agencies, but it’s possible.

Austin isn’t publishing 2025 data yet and Little Rock doesn’t have 2019 data available, but two things stand out about all of the other agencies.

First, all of them are recording lower response times so far in 2025 than they did in 2024 with many of the agencies showing substantial declines from where they were between 2022 and 2024. The average response time in New Orleans in 2022 was nearly 2 1/2 hours, Seattle was around an hour and a half in 2024 (though the exact Seattle response time is a bit challenging to nail down because SPD’s Calls for Service data is particularly complex), and San Francisco hit 81 minutes in 2023.

Those three cities are at 65, 87 and 67 minutes so far in 2025. There is definite improvement in 2025 after generally worsening response times between 2019 and the 2022 to 2024 timeframe.

Second, all of these cities are above their 2019 average response times with the exception of Cincinnati — and Cincinnati’s response time is and has been consistently excellent throughout this timeframe. So while it’s good news that response times are generally falling in these cities with data, they’re still considerably higher than they were in 2019.

Which makes sense given that officer counts in bigger cities have fallen a ways since 2019 and staffing is the most important factor in changing response times. But it’s not the only factor and there are steps that cities can (and probably have) take to reduce responses further.

The trend is positive, but the level for many cities remains too high. There is more work most of these agencies need to do before response times return to normal again.

Measuring response times is challenge and ideally there would be national standards for publishing Calls for Service data and calculating response times, plus national benchmarks for cities of various sizes and staffing levels. Still, this method can be applied to see where things are right now, how they’ve improved in the last few years, and evaluate where they go in the rest of 2025 and beyond.