Photo: Steve Neavling, Motor City Muckraker
Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan says the Detroit police department is taking a closer look at its response times following a series of investigative reports that found long waits for service.
Deadline Detroit in January reported that urgent crimes from armed robberies to homicides take an average 40 minutes to receive a response, making Detroit one of the slowest departments in the country. The investigation, conducted through a computer analysis, also found that average response times for priority one calls increased to 14 minutes and 18 seconds last year, up from the previous year’s 13 minutes and 12 seconds.
WXYZ later reported that 3,000 priority 1 calls last year took 30 minutes or more to receive service.
Duggan addressed the reporting for the first time yesterday in remarks made to media after his annual budget presentation. According to WXYZ, he called the 3,000 calls "outliers," and maintained that the average response times for the most urgent 911 calls in Detroit hovers between 12 and 13 minutes. But, he said the city is also taking WXYZ's report "seriously" and "looking at it very carefully.”
“What Chief Craig is looking at is which are times that were delayed because we had an unusual spike in calls, and which are calls that were delayed because there was a problem with the call taker or the dispatcher,” Duggan said.
“I don’t think that 911 calls should go to hold,” Duggan said. “Do we have enough call takers? What’s the data on how often that actually happens? We’re looking at all of that right now.”
Last week, a Detroit police official told the Detroit Board of Police Commissioners the department was "working through some of the things that are identified" and that the department has "increased our protocols ourselves."
"There are things we saw and said, ‘Hey we can do that a little bit better,’ ” Assistant Chief James White said. It's unclear what those improvements might be.
Mayor Duggan's 2019 budget proposal includes an additional $10 million for public safety. The money would help the department hire 70 new officers.
