225,000 priority 911 calls in Chicago go unanswered so far in 2023 – Wirepoints

By: Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner

The dysfunction in Chicago continues. This week two 22-year-old female tourists were physically attacked and then knocked to the ground by a group of between eight and ten people around 2 am in the Loop. The criminals left after robbing the women of their valuables. It took the police two hours to show up.

On the same night, another downtown tourist was victimized when five men attacked and robbed him of his cash, jewelry, and phone. The police didn’t arrive for at least three hours.

These cases are just two of the 225,000 urgent Chicago 911 calls with no police available so far this year. That’s about 52 percent of all priority 911 calls in 2023 and far higher than the 19 percent of priority calls that went unanswered in 2019.

Unless Chicago’s top leadership finally comes up with a plan that works to improve police morale, deterrence, arrest rates and prosecutions, major crimes will hit post-2019 highs and hundreds of thousands of new 911 calls will go unanswered. Victims of robbery, sexual assault and battery, stabbings and shootings will continue to wait hours for police to help them.

No response at least half the time

The latest data uncovered by Wirepoints FOIA request shows that police officers’ ability to respond to urgent “Priority Level 1” and “Priority Level 2” 911 calls has gotten worse since 2019. 

Priority 1 calls include incidents with “an imminent threat to life, bodily injury, or major property damage/loss.” And Priority 2 calls include incidents where “timely police action…has the potential to affect the outcome of an incident.”

Such calls rarely involve more routine dispatches like noise complaints or theft reports. Please see Appendix for more details on the city’s 911 calls and police “Radio Assignments Pending.” 

During pre-covid, pre-George Floyd 2019, the city received more than 800,000 high-priority 911 calls. Of those calls, only 156,000, or about 19 percent, had no officers available to immediately respond. 

The non-response rate grew to 30 percent in 2020, then 52 percent in 2021, and then a high 60 percent of calls in 2022. Through July 25th of this year, 52 percent of high-priority 911 calls had no immediate response from police.

Here are just a few of the high-priority calls police couldn’t immediately respond to so far this year:

• 8,073 – assaults in progress
• 9,641 – batteries in progress
• 7,653 – instances of domestic battery
• 5,011 – mental health disturbance
• 1,906 – person threatening or attempted suicide
• 1,800 – violation of court protection order
• 8,633 – person with a gun
• 2,732 – person with a knife
• 5,159 – shots fired
• 546 – person shot
• 463 – person stabbed
• 226 – robbery in progress

And that’s just through July 25th, 2023. Adding up the number of delayed 911 responses across the last three years shows there are tens of thousands of victims of serious crimes who couldn’t get the immediate help they needed.

Chicago’s broken criminal justice system

The inability to respond to emergency calls in a timely manner is just another example of how sick Chicago’s law enforcement/criminal justice system has become.

No amount of money and no amount of cops will fix Chicago’s crime problems. It will only turn around when Chicago’s leaders decide to treat criminals like criminals, let police do policing and finally prosecute and sentence bad guys. Under today’s leadership, there’s no such plan.

Appendix

Chicago police handle about 1.3 million dispatched 911 calls for service each year. The 911 data comes from a dashboard kept by the city’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG). OIG numbers come straight from the Office of Emergency Operations and Communications, which runs the city’s 911 center. 

Between 2019 and 2023 YTD, a little over 60 percent of all 911 calls were deemed high priority (Priorities 1 and 2).

While the total number of priority 911 calls has remained largely consistent over the last 5 years, there has been a clear increase in the number of times 911 dispatchers could find no officers available to be assigned to those urgent calls for help.

Those periods of backlogged police dispatches are known by the somewhat misleading name of Radio Assignments Pending or “RAP”.

It’s important to note that a RAP is not counted as one delayed response to one 911 dispatch. Instead, police representatives told Wirepoints it is “a range of time in which no dispatchable resources are available in the District/dispatch group.” A RAP is only declared over after all delayed responses to high-priority 911 dispatches have been cleared by police arriving on the scene.

The number of RAP periods in Chicago have tripled over the last four years, growing to more than 15,100 in 2022 up from 5,100 in 2019.

Unfortunately, Wirepoints can’t determine just how long RAPs typically last. But if the two robberies covered above – along with the examples we cited last year – are typical responses, then RAPs can last anywhere from a few minutes to several hours at a time.

Read more from Wirepoints:

• Chicago criminals have green light to rob, loot, burgle as odds of punishment collapse to near zero.
• Chicago’s budget soared by 50% — $5.7 billion — in four years, but Mayor Johnson wants more
• 204 Chicago homicides in Mayor Johnson’s first 100 days – including four teenagers killed last weekend
• Johnson approves progressive ‘mansion tax’: Hits Chicagoans, businesses when they’re down