City Studies Police Response Times

After a long wait, Surprise (Ariz.) city officials now have raw response time data for police incidents dating back to Jan. 2007, but they’re having difficulty making sense of it. Apparently the police department didn’t have a standard way for officers to report on-scene, which has skewed the data. Sgt. Mark Ortega gave a reporter one example: while the assigned officer responds to a Priority 1 incident, a second officer arrives on-scene. However, the response time clock continues to tick for the incident until the first officer is logged on-scene. Officers and dispatchers can both log an “on-scene” entry, which sometimes skews the data, Ortega said. Read more about their data dilemma here.