While officers got to some calls faster, many arrival times are still way past the department’s benchmarks For the first time in more than a decade, San Diego police response times inched downward last fiscal year, but officers are still taking too long — sometimes hours — to get to calls. Although police have long gotten to emergencies like deadly shootings in minutes, response times to all other call types have surpassed the department’s benchmarks for many years. That decade-old trend reversed course in fiscal 2023, according to city budget documents released last month.
The news may not be as good as it seems, according to the San Diego police union president. 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 fell by about 30,000. That could partly reflect the small drop in crime the city saw last year.
But it could also signal that persistently long wait times have led to a decrease in people calling police at all, San Diego Police Officers Association President Jared Wilson said. “Have they gone down because crime is down? Or have people just realized that they’re ultimately not going to get a police officer response in a timely fashion, and they know that, and they’ve given up,” Wilson said. In fiscal 2023, it took police, on average, 33 minutes to respond to Priority 1 calls.
