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For Emergency Calls Only
'Breaking Point' Near "If we don't hire some new officers quickly, we may be straining our resources past the breaking point," said Councilman Peter F. Vallone Jr. (D-Queens). The citywide average response time for emergency incidents was 4 minutes, 30 seconds, a 6-second decrease from 2006, the NYPD said. In 2005, the average emergency response time was 4 minutes, 48 seconds, the department said. However, the citywide non-emergency response time was 7 minutes, 6 seconds, which was a 6-second increase from 2006. Mr. Vallone and others said that it often takes much longer for the police to arrive in those situations. "Non-emergency calls will result in long waits," he remarked. "Car accidents or 'past' break-ins you could wait hours, and that's because they just don't have cops out there." The Councilman added that the matter was a major issue for his constituents in Astoria. "It's one of the biggest complaints that I'm getting at community meetings," he said. Paul Browne, the NYPD's chief spokesman, stressed that police are getting to emergencies faster and maintained that the overall response numbers were "steady." More With Less During his tenure, Mayor Bloomberg has reduced the NYPD's headcount by more than 4,000 officers through attrition due to fiscal constraints that the city imposed after 9/11 and poorly-calculated spending by the Giuliani administration. The NYPD employed approximately 41,000 officers at its zenith in 2000 under Rudy Giuliani, but the force now has fewer than 36,000 officers, Mr. Vallone noted. Despite the smaller force, for the first time in at least 45 years, the city finished the year with fewer than 500 homicides. "Arrests in the city are actually up, so they really are doing more with less," Mr. Vallone said. Mike Bosak, a retired NYPD Sergeant and police historian, questioned the department's response-time stats. "Street cops tell me patrol precincts are turning out with fewer and fewer cars," he said. The figures weren't positive for every borough. Critical response times in Staten Island rose for the first time in three years to 5 minutes, 42 seconds, a 6-second increase. Non-emergency responses also increased to 8 minutes, 42 seconds, an 18-second hike, which was nearly a minute more than any other borough. Deputy Commissioner Browne said that "geography" was a major factor on Staten Island. "But it remains one of the safest places in the nation," he added. "Were it its own city, Staten Island would have ranked the safest among cities with populations of 100,000 or more, according to last month's FBI report on crime nationwide." The borough didn't receive any of the rookie officers who graduated from the Police Academy at the end of December. Those 914 cops were all assigned to the department's Operation Impact program, which floods high-crime areas with new officers. Staten Island has no Impact Zones, and so the NYPD allocated additional overtime money to place the equivalent of 40 officers in the area. No Improvement "Operation Impact isn't making it any better," Mr. Vallone said. "Non-'Impact' precincts will not be getting one Police Officer." NYPD officials have acknowledged that some outer-borough precincts are now working with two or three patrol cars during night shifts, when they had been staffed with six or seven in the past. "I'm deeply troubled by it," Mr. Vallone said. "Because right now it's just non-emergency response times, but if we don't rectify the situations, it will be seen in other areas." The NYPD is developing a plan to place high-tech Global Positioning Systems in its patrol vehicles to help improve emergency response times. By all accounts, the program is in its nascent stages and may only be used for emergency calls. The Bloomberg administration has already installed the Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL) devices in its ambulances and fire engines, and recently launched a pilot program for Sanitation Department collection trucks. Critics of the NYPD have pointed out that police patrol cars respond to emergency calls on the basis of which officers nearby are available. But officers are often reluctant to deal with inherently more-complicated non-emergency calls. By contrast, the FDNY uses trained dispatchers to send specific units to each emergency. NYPD Response Times The following chart shows the NYPD's average response times, in minutes, to emergency calls during the past three years, as well as its average response times for all calls during 2007. Responses in three boroughs - Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens - are listed for their North and South commands.
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