High-priority 911 calls—Priority Level 1 and 2, the ones defined as “imminent threat to life, bodily injury, or major property damage”—are the exact emergencies Chicagoans face every day: shots fired, person shot, assault in progress, armed robbery, domestic battery. In 2019, before the progressive crime wave fully metastasized, 19% of those urgent calls had “no officers available” for immediate response. By 2021, Wirepoints found that number had exploded to 52%—406,829 high-priority incidents in which dispatchers literally had zero cops to send. In 2022 it hit roughly 60%. Through all of 2023, 56% of high-priority calls—437,000 of them—sat in backlog with no units available. Even in 2024, through mid-May, getting a response was still a coin-flip 50%: 127,000 out of 256,000 urgent calls in which nobody came. That’s not “delayed,” that’s “we have no police available to send to you.”
In Chicago in 2023, more than 1,800 calls were made to 911 of a person being shot. Only about 800 – fewer than half – were responded to immediately by police officers. The other 1,000 callers were victims of 911 backlogs, where no police were available at the time of the call. Those victims had to wait half an hour, an hour, or even several hours for the 911 call backlog to end and for police to finally arrive.
It was the same for the 32,000 911 calls of an assault in progress, where police were only immediately available for 50% of those calls. And it was the same for 54% of the city’s 911 calls of 35,000 batteries in progress.
In all, there were 783,000 high-priority 911 calls in 2023. For 437,000 of those calls, or 56%, long periods of backlogs meant there were no police immediately available. Wirepoints obtained the 911 call and response data directly from the Chicago Police Department via FOIA.
https://wirepoints.org/if-youre-shot-robbed-or-assaulted-in-chicago-theres-a-50-50-chance-therell-be-no-police-to-respond-to-your-911-call-wirepoints/
2019
When Lashonda Tart desperately needed the police on a summer evening in 2019, they never showed up. A gunman had fired a hail of bullets that shattered the windows of her Homan Square house while she and her children were inside, she said. Tart hid her kids in a closet and dialed 911. They waited. After 10 minutes she called 911 again. Then she called her neighborhood police station and reported the shooting to the sergeants’ desk. Fearing for their lives, she and her children waited another hour. “Nobody ever came,” Tart said.
It wasn’t the first time her calls for help had gone unanswered. But Tart felt she had hit a breaking point, her faith in police destroyed.
“It was very demeaning, degrading,” Tart said. “There was no help, no respite. No nothing.” Many Chicagoans, especially those living in Black and Latinx neighborhoods, have similar experiences of being left to fend for themselves in times of crisis. Police leadership has blamed inadequate 911 responses on a shortage of officers and resources. But the police department’s own records suggest the problem isn’t the number of officers — it’s what those officers are doing on their shifts.
Hundreds of Chicago police officers daily are assigned to what the department calls rapid response duty, with the stated mission of responding to emergencies. But a Block Club analysis of police data shows those officers are rarely dispatched to 911 calls.
In the first half of 2023, only a tenth of the activity reported by rapid response officers was dedicated to 911 calls — a steep drop from 2020, when 911 responses accounted for nearly half of their activity, according to data from the city’s Office of Emergency Management and Communications.
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The new ‘stop and frisk’? Chicago police make millions of traffic stops while searching for guns
Chicago police pulled over hundreds of thousands more drivers than they previously reported, but found guns in fewer than 1 out of every 150 stops, according to a new data analysis.
Instead of servicing 911 calls, rapid response officers spent the majority of their time conducting traffic stops, the dispatch data shows.
Rapid response officers conducted at least 36,000 traffic stops in the first half of 2023, accounting for nearly two-thirds of their logged activity. That’s nearly double the portion that traffic stops made up in 2019. Besides traffic stops, the rapid response officers reported thousands of other activities, including community interactions, domestic disturbance checks, burglary responses, emergencies at CTA stations, and wellness checks. But these other activities have made up a smaller and smaller share of rapid response officers’ documented work in recent years, the dispatch data shows.
The wait times for emergency assistance show that the police department needs to reexamine how it uses its officers, say public safety advocates and the city’s own inspector general. “This is not a resource shortage problem,” said inspector general Deborah Witzburg. “This is about resource allocation.”
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