Tracking Police Response Times

With crime out of control across the U.S., cities that 'de-funded' police are also dealing with another consequence of their bad decisions. Slow response times.

According to a new report, the city of Dallas is still struggling with slow response times.

"It's kind of a nationwide effect that we have right now" said Doug Griffith, president of the Houston Police Officers' Union, "We have issues recruiting and retaining officers, so everybody's low on manpower, and when you're dealing with a higher volume of calls in big cities like Houston, you're going to have a slower response time."

With that said, the response times here in Houston are much better than they are in Dallas.

"When you take a look at Houston, we're 677 square miles" Griffith told KTRH, "With only 5,000 officers, and out of that less than half are on patrol, it's going to make it where you're going to have a longer response time. Now ours is better than Dallas."

Right now, it's about 6-6:30 minutes for a code 1 which is the highest priority, code 2 is somewhere in the :10 -:11 minute range, and for everything else you can expect to wait anywhere from :15 minutes to an hour depending on the incident. But of you do call the police, you are going to get a response.

One thing that would really help the response times here in Houston, which are still some of the slowest since the 90's, would be hiring more officers. Whether or not that happens, remains to be seen.

"We have a lot more people now in the city of Houston" noted Griffith, "If we're 2,000 to 3,000 officers down, we're not going to make that up anytime soon. It's going to be years."