When she returned home, she saw that her wallet was missing and her bedroom was in disarray. It appeared that someone had thrown a rock through her child’s window and opened it from the outside. As she continued looking, she found more items were missing. Jewelry, tablets, her laptop, passport and other personal belongings were gone.
She called 911 around 1 a.m. Officers with the Dallas Police Department didn’t show up until about 8 a.m.
The department has faced challenges with response times for some years now, unable to show up to every call in a timely manner. It's a problem that's been noticed by many, including two people who ran for City Council this year, who said they hoped to reduce police response times if elected to lead Dallas’ District 8.
The auditing firm KPMG released a study of the DPD in 2019, identifying reduced response times as one of the goals of the department. While a shortage of officers was a contributing factor, the study said that additional personnel wouldn't necessarily fix the problem of slow response times.
“Increased staffing alone cannot achieve complete success toward organizational goals (like) reduced response times, citywide crime reduction, and increased service levels for citizens,” the study said. “Rather, a realignment of strategy, goals, mission, and tactics would yield highest return.”
Calls to DPD are categorized by priority. None of them, regardless of priority level, allows for a response time like the seven hours Rhoads waited for police to arrive. Rhoads should have had to wait for only 30 minutes to an hour for police to touch base with her.
Very often, however, it takes hours for police to arrive for a service call like the one Rhoads made.
If you want a quicker response, someone had better be in immediate danger, which would constitute a priority 1 call. Priority 2 calls also require an officer urgently arriving to the scene. Priority 3 and 4 calls are generally non-critical calls to just file a report.
Priority 1 calls generally take 10 minutes to respond to. Priority 2 calls have reached response times of about 90 minutes. Priority 3 and 4 calls can take up to 10 hours for a response. This year, each level has experienced an increase in response times over last year. Response times for priority 1 calls increased by more than 6% since 2022, and priority 2 calls saw an increase in wait times of more than 42%. Priority 3 calls saw an increase in response times of 53%, and response times for priority 4 calls increased by more than 30%.“Nationwide, we’re seeing issues throughout the law enforcement community that are very similar." – Robert Uribe, Dallas Police Department
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All of these calls take longer than DPD would like.
Robert Uribe, the department’s 911 communications technology administrator, said the target response time for priority 1 calls is about eight minutes. Priority 2 calls should get a response in 12 minutes. Priority 3 calls should be taking 30 minutes to get a response, and priority 4 calls should take about an hour.
“We’re constantly trying to improve [response times],” Uribe said. “At this junction, obviously we have a couple of challenges.”
For one, the department is seeing higher numbers of priority 1 and 2 calls.
“Whenever we get a priority 1 call, as an example, because of the intensity of the event, it requires several more officers to be tied up for a much longer time,” he said. The highest-priority calls can require an average of five officers to be on the scene, whereas a call to file a lower-priority report often requires only one officer.
He said the department has recently taken steps to improve response times. On July 3, for example, the department rolled out a new online reporting requirement for nonemergencies.
Under the new system, certain nonemergency calls are now required to be filed online or by phone, meaning an officer won’t show up to the scene to make a report. The investigative process from there is the same. The department estimates that this new requirement will free up some 130,000 patrol hours in the first year.
Uribe thinks it’s too early to determine the effects of this new requirement, but there has been a decrease in the number of calls on hold for service. “I see that there are improvements at this point,” he said. He isn't sure exactly how DPD’s response times stack up against police response times in other cities, but departments across the country are facing similar problems.
“Nationwide, we’re seeing issues throughout the law enforcement community that are very similar,” he said. “Other places have instituted some similar nonemergency reporting procedures, especially some of these major cities. Chicago, LA, are all having to rethink how they’re responding to some of these non-emergency calls so they can focus on their high-priority calls.”
Jeff Asher, a crime analyst who publishes on Substack, told NPR that after compiling response time data from 15 cities, he found sizable increases across the country. Average response times in New Orleans, for example, almost tripled from 51 minutes in 2019 to 146 minutes in 2022. In New York, the average response time jumped from 18 minutes to 33 minutes. Almost every city Asher looked at (which didn’t include Dallas) saw some increase in average response times, which he said can be attributed to officer shortages. Also, the longer response times could lead to underreporting of crime and decrease the likelihood that reported crimes get solved.
Long response times from police has become a problem in other parts of Texas too. An investigation by the Houston Chronicle found that local police are responding to high-priority calls at the slowest rate since 1990.
When the police finally arrived at Rhoads’ house, they took a report of the incident and the stolen items, later sending a team out to dust for fingerprints. She was given a piece of paper with a case number on it and was told a detective would reach out to her. That never happened, so she went to the police station herself to meet with the detective on her case.
She told the detective she believed she knew who was responsible and gave him the information. She cried and pleaded for help in finding who had broken into her house, and the detective told her, “Just let us do our jobs.”
It’s been about seven months and Rhoads said she still hasn’t heard back from DPD regarding the burglary at her home. "To this day," she said. "I have not been contacted by the DPD regarding this, nor updated on this case.”
