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Police Operations and Data Analysis Report, Morgan Hill, California
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Priority 1 calls. The team should work to amend the present call priority default system to ensure
in-progress crimes and life-safety calls are reflected at the highest priority classification and other
calls that may now be classified as Priority 1 calls are reprogrammed to a more appropriate
priority.
TABLE 5-1: Average Dispatch, Travel, and Response Times, by Priority
Priority
Dispatch
Travel
Response
Calls
1
2.7
4.8
7.6
233
2
6.6
6.6
13.2
628
3
10.5
8.2
18.7
5,030
4
16.5
10.4
26.9
2,094
1*
Fire / EMS
4.0
4.8
8.8
218
Weighted Average/Total
11.3
8.4
19.8
8,209
Injury accidents
1.9
2.3
4.2
57
Note
: The total average is weighted according to the number of calls within each priority level. There were seven
calls without priority assigned.
*218 Fire and EMS calls were removed from the Priority 1 listing of 233 police responses. They are included in the
line marked 1*. These numbers reflect the police response to fire and EMS calls. This was done to more accurately
reflect the police department response time to Priority 1 calls not involving fire and EMS.
Observations:
High-priority calls had an average response time of 7.6 minutes, lower than the weighted
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
4:00p.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.