By Sasha Gonzales
[email protected]
Dispatch times for NYPD officers sent to crime scenes in the Bronx are among the slowest in New York City, according to a new report.
The city’s Independent Budget Office examined the length of time it takes dispatchers to find officers to respond to possible crimes in progress, and found delays in several Bronx precincts.
“Although required under a 1991 law, the city does not publish data by precinct that tells New Yorkers how long it takes the police department to respond to a 911 call—from the initial call to the time officers arrive at the scene,” the report states. “What we do have on the precinct level is dispatch time, the minutes and seconds it takes for a police dispatcher to find and assign officers to respond to a possible crime in progress.”
On average, dispatch time for the city’s 77 NYPD precincts last year was 3.8 minutes in a total of roughly 450,000 possible crimes-in-progress, the IBO found.
That was up from a citywide average of 3.0 minutes in 2014, the report said.
Average dispatch time varied widely among police precincts, with a low of 1.6 minutes in the 100th Precinct in the Rockaways to a high of 8.0 minutes in the 47th Precinct in the Wakefield and Woodlawn neighborhoods of the Bronx, according to the IBO.
Across the city, nine precincts had crime in progress dispatch times greater than 5 minutes. Six of those precincts were in the Bronx, the report found.
The researchers also determined that the gap between the average dispatch time in the Bronx and the average citywide has grown.
In 2018, the average dispatch time of 5.6 minutes in the Bronx exceeded the citywide average by nearly 2 minutes, about three times the difference in 2014, the report said.
The delays occurred despite the fact that crime-in-progress incidents rose less rapidly in the Bronx than in the rest of the city from 2014 through 2018, researchers found.
“Moreover, the number of uniformed officers assigned to the Bronx increased more rapidly than elsewhere over the same period,” the report states.
The IBO said it relied on the dispatch data because the NYPD has failed to provide the City Council with quarterly reports on police response times as required under Local Law 89, which went into effect in 1991.
Under the law, the department is supposed to provide response data aggregated by borough, precinct, and the three daily police shifts, according to the IBO.