Northeast News
February 8, 2012

Kansas City Police Department is slimming down its response times.

“We track a lot of performance measures, but one that the public feels most acutely is response times. The time between when someone calls 911 and help arrives may just be a few minutes, but it can feel like an eternity,” KCPD Chief Darryl Forté wrote in his blog. “We are dedicated to getting our officers to the public’s aid as quickly as possible, which is why we’re implementing new goals for response times.”

The goal for Priority 1 calls, which present the most potential danger to human life, has been reduced from a 10-minute response time to seven minutes. Priority 2 calls are now 9 minutes, down from 12 minutes. Response times are measured from the time someone calls 911 to the time an officer arrives on the scene.

Priority 1 calls can range from officer assist incidents to shootings to injury accidents to rape to robberies and other extreme situations. Priority 2 calls are categorized as calls in which “potential for injuries to occur exists, but has not yet happened.” Those calls include incidents like prowlers, burglaries, bomb threats and disturbances.

“We wanted our new response time goals to show how important it is to us that officers arrive at emergencies as quickly as possible,” Forté said.

The new goals also better reflect the department’s current performance, he said. In December of 2011, KCPD met the 7-minute goal for Priority 1 calls 79 percent of the time. The median response time was 7.67 minutes.

In 2000, KCPD began tracking response times, which are affected by a number of conditions like weather, road conditions, officers in training or officers out sick, he said. Response times are usually shorter in the inner-city patrol divisions than the suburban patrol divisions since the suburban divisions are geographically larger.