1. How much has the police response time increased?
A: A recent report prepared for the Metro Community Oversight Board looked at several years and found that Metro Nashville PD’s response rate has been increasing since 2018.
In 2022, the latest data available, Metro PD took on average 74 minutes to respond to calls, that’s almost 30% longer than it took them the year before.
• Emergency calls increased from 10.7 mins in 2020 to 15.0 in 2022.
• Urgent calls increased from 35.5 mins in 2020 to 64.2 in 2022.
• Routine calls increased from 66.3 mins in 2020 to 129.3 in 2022.
In 2018, calls for a person with a weapon took 21 mins to respond to, but it took about 38 mins in 2022. Calls for a shooting in 2018 took over 12 mins, it took about 31 mins in 2022.
What’s interesting is the increase in overall call response time is largely driven by a caller’s average time in queue. This increase could itself be driven both by slower response times by EMS dispatch and/or by longer response times from MNPD officers available to respond to a call.
This is all happening as Metro PD isn’t fully staffed with either police officers or civilian positions. Like other PDs around the country, Metro has been trying to hire more staff and still has vacancies, they have been actively recruiting to bring their numbers up.
But in the meantime, police payroll has increased over the years.
The FY 2023 payroll was $176 million, that’s a $55 million increase from five years ago. So we see response times increasing, they’re trying to hire more staff and payroll is going up.
2. How does this compare to other cities PD’s?
A: Nashville’s 74-minute average response time is one of the highest among cities that this report looked at. The only city with a higher response time is New Orleans at 146 mins.
Portland, NY, Seattle, San Francisco, Sacramento, Detroit, Virginia Beach, are far below Nashville in terms of how long they take to respond.
Noting this, the report said, “it’s unlikely that MNPD’s response times are due to any one issue.” There are various issues, so Metro PD and other agencies should research how these various concerns interact and influence one another.