City of Morgan Hill Public Safety Master Plan

High-Priority Calls The department assigned priorities to calls with 1 as the highest priority. Table 8-19 shows average response times by priority, with an additional line for injury accidents. The CAD system assigned a priority 1 to fire and EMS calls. Because they are handled differently by the police department, Table 8-19’s first line only excludes fire and EMS calls, and they are included just above the total in a line marked with an asterisk.

TABLE 8-19: Average Dispatch, Travel, and Response Times, by Priority

Priority

Dispatch Travel Response

Calls

1 2 3 4

2.7 6.6

4.8 6.6 8.2 4.8 8.4 3.6

7.6

233 628

13.2 18.7 26.9

10.5 16.5

5,030 2,094

10.4

1*

4.0

8.8

218

Weighted Average/ Total

11.3

19.8

8,209

Injury accidents 28 Note: The total average is weighted according to the number of calls within each priority level. There were seven calls without a priority assigned. 1.7 5.3

Observations:

 High-priority calls had an average response time of 7.6 minutes, lower than the overall average of 19.8 minutes for all calls.  Average dispatch delay was 2.7 minutes for high-priority calls, compared to 11.3 minutes overall.  Average response time for injury accidents was 5.3 minutes, with a dispatch delay of 1.7 minutes.  Hourly averages sampled fewer than 10 calls for each hour between 1:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. In these cases, a few unusually long calls can seriously affect an hourly average.  For high-priority calls, the longest response times were between 1:00 a.m. and 2:00 a.m., with an average of 11.4 minutes. This was due to one call with a response time greater than 30 minutes. For high-priority calls, the shortest response times were between 3:00 p.m. and 4:00 p.m., with an average of 5.8 minutes.  Average dispatch delay for high-priority calls was consistently 5.1 minutes or less, except between 1:00 a.m. and 2:00 a.m.

Police Operations and Data Analysis Report, Morgan Hill, California

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