Police response times have worsened significantly over the last month, shooting up across all four priority designations used by the City to sort 911 calls.
Priority designations, numbered 1-4, inform responding officers of the urgency of a call, with Priority 1 (P1) calls at one end of the spectrum signaling serious emergencies like active shooters and Priority 4 (P4) calls at the other end for “non-critical” incidents, like a loud music disturbance.
As reported last month in The Dallas Express, response times were already trending upward from 2022 averages in three of the four priority designations, with P1 calls on track to match the 9.6-minute average logged last year.
However, as of Tuesday, average response times have shot up for every designation. P1 calls averaged 9.8 minutes, P2 calls averaged 81.5 minutes, P3 calls averaged 493.7 minutes, and P4 calls averaged 507.2 minutes, according to the City of Dallas Open Data crime analytics dashboard.
For comparison, on February 18, the Dallas Police Department (DPD) was clocking year-to-date averages of 9.6 minutes (P1), 77.5 minutes (P2), 400.8 minutes (P3), and 452.3 minutes (P4).
DPD Senior Corporal Brian Martinez explained to The Dallas Express that the increase in response times was largely due to a steep uptick in P1 and P2 calls.
“When compared [to] the same timeframe in calendar year 2022, calendar year 2023 [call-for-service] volumes are up,” Martinez stated in an email. “Priority 1 call volume [is] up 7.68% compared to last year … [and] Priority 2 call-for-service volume [is] up 4.81%.”
Martinez noted that Dallas has logged a combined total of 3,309 more P1 and P2 calls for service year-to-date than there were last year.
“These high-priority calls require more officers to respond to the scene. The increased number of officers needed for the higher-priority calls decreases their availability for low-priority calls,” Martinez told The Dallas Express.
This year’s greater volume of high-priority calls has in part been driven by the year-to-date rise in violent crime in Dallas, which has seen an overall increase of 5.07% as of Sunday, according to a DPD report.
The report shows that aggravated assaults are currently up by 10.05% and murders are up by 29.17%, a staggering figure that puts the City’s Violent Crime Reduction Plan into question.
As it stands now, DPD is taking 290.1 minutes on average to respond to a call about random gunfire in the city, an increase of almost 20 minutes over its response time last month and roughly 23 minutes more than 2022’s average.