San Diego police response times improve but fall short of targets

For the first time in more than a decade, San Diego Police Department response times dropped slightly last fiscal year, but officers still take too long — sometimes hours — to get to calls.

Although police have long arrived within minutes for emergencies such as fatal shootings, response times for all other call types have exceeded the department’s benchmarks for many years. That decades-long trend has reversed in fiscal year 2023, according to city budget documents released last month.

According to the president of the San Diego police union, the news may not be as good as it seems.

While officials attributed the decline in part to fewer officers leaving the department – a welcome change during one of the worst staffing shortages in the agency’s history – the number of calls officers responded to also dropped by about 30,000.

That could be partly due to a slight drop in crime over the past year, but it could also be a sign that persistently long wait times have led to fewer people calling police in the first place, said Jared Wilson, president of the San Diego Police Officers Association.

“Have they decreased because crime has decreased? Or have people simply realized that ultimately they are not going to get a timely response from the police, and they know that and have given up,” Wilson said.

In fiscal year 2023, it took police an average of 33 minutes to respond to Priority Level 1 calls, which include serious crimes such as domestic violence and child abuse. While that’s several minutes faster than the year before, it’s more than twice the department’s target arrival time of 14 minutes. And it’s nearly three times as long as it took police to respond to those types of calls a decade ago.