@bposton Ben Poston analyzed police response times in Milwaukee @palewire Ben Welsh analyzed fire and medical response times in L.A. http://www.latimes.com/lafddata WHAT FIREFIGHTERS REALLY DO ● More than 80% of LAFD Fire vs. medical responses at LAFD responses are medical ● Media coverage and fire department PR tend to focus on fires ● Extremely long calls get good anecdotal coverage, but full system rarely analyzed (This pie contains real data!) A layman's definition How long it takes from when you dial 911 until a rescuer arrives at the scene. HOW HARD CAN THIS BE? STEVE LOPEZ @latimes columnist Source: http://lat.ms/11DUUNB SO HARD WHY ● Your call is passed between different departments. ● Each can have its own database, analytics, politics. ● Often, nobody responsible for tracking the whole thing. ● People who could have few incentives, little training. A SIMPLIFIED VERSION HOLD CALL TIME PROCESSING TIME TURNOUT TRAVEL TIME TIME HOLD TIME ● How long it takes for a dispatcher to pick up the 911 call. CALL-PROCESSING TIME ● How long it takes the dispatcher to log the incident and send help. TURNOUT TIME ● How long it takes rescuers to suit up and get ready. TRAVEL TIME ● How long it takes rescuers to drive to the scene. A REAL-LIFE VERSION POLICE CALL HOLD TIME PROCESSING POLICE POLICE TURNOUT TRAVEL FIRE CALL FIRE FIRE PROCESSING TURNOUT TRAVEL AT THE CORE, A PUBLIC DATABASE INCIDENT TABLE ● One record per call ● Unique identifier ● Incident type ● Dispatch address ● Lots of timestamps RESPONSE TABLE ● One record per unit ● Many to one with call ● Describes unit type ● More timestamps WHAT'S YOUR STANDARD? BRANT HOUSTON Journalism professor Source: My memory CLEAR STANDARDS BUT THEY ARE OPTIONAL HOLD TIME ● How long it takes for a dispatcher to pick up the 911 call. ● NENA 56-005 says 90% of calls should be answered in under 10 seconds CALL-PROCESSING TIME ● How long it takes the dispatcher to log the incident and send help. ● NFPA 1221 says 90% of fire and medical calls should be dispatched in under 60 seconds TURNOUT TIME ● How long it takes rescuers to suit up and get ready. ● NFPA 1710 says 90% of medical units should be moving in under 60 seconds. TRAVEL TIME ● How long it takes rescuers to drive to the scene. ● NFPA 1710 says the first fire or medical unit should arrive in under 4 minutes for 90% of responses. Do local firefighters meet the standards? Are times getting faster or slower? Does everybody get the same service? You Professional observer Time isn't everything Most calls are not emergencies Grandma gets lonely GENERIC FIRE CHIEF Anytown, USA FOCUS ON CARDIAC ARRESTS ● Only ~2% of medical calls, but everyone agrees time imperative ● Brain death can begin after as little as four minutes ● Recent push for increased speed from scientists and doctors YOU NEED A TEAM @LAJourno @katelinthicum Investigative reporter, City Hall beat writer, nightblogger fears no deadline AND A FEW RABBIS INSIDER DATA GEEKS REAL FIREFIGHTERS Every database has quirks, They live where your data they know them meets reality THE END All materials at palewi.re/talks "RESPONSE TIMES DON'T MATTER" (And other excuses police will make) By Ben Poston - Let's say you get police response time data - Your PD will likely say response times don’t matter. - They will say that they are not a good measure on which to judge a PD’s performance. How come? Research done in the 1970s and 1980s that showed that a rapid police response to calls for service only makes a difference on crimes in progress and victims often don't report crimes right away. The research suggested that just rushing to calls depletes valuable resources that could be used for crime prevention. Milwaukee PD: A case study - MPD crime numbers had declined for 4 straight years - We heard skepticism from every corner of the community - I wanted to get behind the numbers Response times lag as strategy shifts I reported response times were 10% slower on average and they had gotten slower in 13 of 15 major categories. Examples: Officers took more than 2 hours to respond to a fatal car crash, 45 minutes for a fatal stabbing and more than a half-hour for an armed robbery Residents complained that cops don’t respond at all to minor crimes like theft from auto, drug dealing, graffiti, and loud music. Police response: "Meh" The department’s take: Response times don’t matter that much. "Since the average resident of this city is willing to wait four hours for the cable guy and half a day for a furniture delivery, it seems to me a reasonable delay in responding for a call is an acceptable balance," the police chief said. That's not all that changed ... The department’s entire strategy had shifted from a reactive strategy to more of a proactive one. Less focus on rapid response and instead quadrupled the number of cars stops and tripled the number of subject stops. They were all about “high visibility policing.” The police said this deployment shift was a key driver to their declining crime numbers Calls are prioritized Like most big-city PDs, Milwaukee police now prioritize their calls, using a system from Priority 1 to 5. For minor calls like loud music and drug dealing, police often take reports over the phone or send an officer the next day to prioritize. They called it the differential police response unit. In Milwaukee, the number of these had more than doubled in 3 years, raising lots of questions. Tips for reporting on police response times Hit the meetings: go to neighborhood watch block meetings. This is where people complain every week about crime and poor police responses. Residents also complained about feeling harassed by police dispatchers - they claimed they bullied them or talked them out of reporting a crime. Spend a night in a hood: I had been talking to resident Thom Reed, who lived in a high-crime neighborhood. The things he told me were hard to believe, so I went out to see it myself. In one six-hour period, I witnessed shots fired and drug dealing. It helped me write with authority and add color to a follow-up piece. Differential police response units Giving a lower priority to less serious calls makes sense, but this policy upset residents more than anything. Most people have expectation of seeing a police cruiser when they call 911. After a few hours, they get frustrated and give up and this colors their view of police. Skeptics claimed that police used the DPRs to slough off crime, though we never could prove that. KNOW YOUR DATA I initially got police response time data and realized later that it was from time entered to dispatched, but didn’t capture the time to arrive on scene, making the times seem faster. GET THE RAW DATA We got aggregated data for the 2011 stories, but later got the raw CAD data that allowed us to dig deeper for trends. You can also use that call data to populate an interactive maps of calls. Track crime through the criminal justice system CAD data is the very beginning of the process. With police CAD data, you can request the associated incident report number. This would allow you to see how often police create a report by call type and overall. You can also see how often police flag calls as nuisance calls. LINK 'EM UP! If you were so inclined, you could then link those incident reports up with crime data if your police department is a NIBRS agency or collects incident-level data. From there, you merge that data with your District Attorney’s case management data (assuming your DA is not living in the stone ages, which many are).