Being there for citizens in times of crisis is fundamental to the oath every officer takes to protect and serve our community. For this reason, we take our emergency response times very seriously. With fewer officers, NOPD has had to more aggressively prioritize how it deploys resources, but our focus has not - and will not - waiver from ensuring an immediate on-scene response when the safety of a member of the public is in jeopardy.
Unfortunately, the data presented to the City Council's Criminal Justice Committee today conflate response times in true emergencies with response times for routine non-emergency service calls, including calls which do not even involve an alleged crime. The best measure of how well we are fulfilling our duty to respond to 911 emergencies is to confine the response time average and median calculations to Code 2 or higher calls for service. This is the method we use to continually monitor our performance by district, shift, hour and day in real-time, and the measure we think will best reflect the typical experience of a citizen calling our department to request emergency assistance.
When controlling for the priority designation (emergency vs non-emergency) of 911 calls, the public facing and internal data both indicate that we are managing to maintain relatively swift median response times despite our struggles with manpower.
Re: dispositions - it is true that there has been an increase in the % of incidents resulting in "Gone on Arrival" dispositions in recent years. However - and again reflecting the extent to which we have been forced to prioritize limited resources- the change is mostly confined to non-violent incidents as classified by the initial call for service signal type. For violent offenses, there was an uptick in the percentage of cases resulting in Gone On Arrival dispositions in the second quarter of this year, but we are seeing those numbers return to the mean thus far in the current quarter.
The data required to produce the above measures are publicly available using Calls for Service data NOPD publishes on data.nola.gov. As noted by AH Datalytics in today's presentation, NOPD continues to be one of the most progressive departments in the country in terms of sharing raw law enforcement records. We used records from January 01, 2021 through July 26, 2022 for the charts above.